Interface

18

The South Platte River looked big and important on maps of Denver. It approached the city from the north-northeast. Its valley and flood plain were several miles wide and served as a corridor for a bundle of major transportation routes: state highways, an interstate, natural gas pipelines, major railways, and high-tension power lines. The first time Eleanor had seen it was shortly after she and Harmon had arrived in Denver and they were driving around looking for places to live. Harmon drove and Eleanor navigated, and she got them lost. She got them lost because she was trying to use the mighty South Platte as a landmark, and instead they kept crossing back and forth over a paltry creek or drainage ditch out in the middle of nowhere. Not until she actually saw the name of the thing on a sign by a bridge could she believe that this dried-up rill was all there was to it.

They had crossed the Platte again a couple of years ago on their way to the Commerce Vista Motel and Mobile Home Haven. In retrospect, Eleanor knew that Harmon had craftily plotted their trajectory so that they could reach the place without having to pass through any part of Commerce City proper. They'd come in from the northwest, from the middle-class suburbs where they had raised their family, past brand-new strip malls sitting totally empty with weathered FOR LEASE banners stretched across their fronts, across open grassland that was too close to the flood plain or too far from the highway to develop. At the edge of Commerce City they had passed quickly through a brief unpleasant flurry of franchise development and then come upon the Commerce Vista. Somehow Eleanor had failed to notice the WEEKLY RATES sign on the motel's marquee, and she hadn't even bothered to look across the highway, off to the eastern edge of the mobile home park. She hadn't looked that way because it was nothing but empty grassland stretching vastly under a white sky, and Eleanor didn't like to look east across that territory because it told her exactly how far she was from home. But if she had looked she would have seen that it was surrounded by tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, with signs every few yards reading U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS - NO TRESPASSING. Tangles of plumbing stuck mysteriously out of the ground from place to place, and every few hundred yards was a white wooden box with a peaked roof, like an oversized birdhouse, containing instruments to monitor the air.

Prairie grass was the only thing that would grow in the yellow rock flour that passed for soil at the Commerce Vista. But the vegetation was all gone and so now it was just a hardpan mixed with broken glass so that it sparkled when the sun hit it right. There were no particular roads or streets, only the tracks left by the last vehicle. The only thing that kept it all from blowing away was the tamping action of car and truck tires, and the little waist-high fences that partitioned the land into tiny lots and gave each trailer a yard to call its own.

On their first visit to the place, Eleanor had noticed that the neighbor's gate had a little decoration on it. One of Doreen's kids had put it up. It was a jack-o-lantern: a circle of orange con­struction paper with three black triangles in it, one for each eye and one at the bottom that was apparently supposed to be the mouth. It hadn't struck her as odd that they had Halloween decorations up in June. Not until they'd moved in did Doreen explain that the symbol was, in fact, a copy of the radiation symbols that their kids saw across the highway at the arsenal.

She remembered all of these things one night as she reclined in the front seat of her old Datsun, trying to get some sleep. Eleanor tried not to think of the old Datsun as a car. She tried to think of it as a highly compact mobile home. She called it the Annex.

She could still remember walking down the street in D.C. with her mother when she was a kid and encountering dirty men who slept in parked cars. She could remember how frightened she was of those men and of the way they lived. She didn't want to be like that.

It was not really such a big deal, when you thought about it logically. She was living in a mobile-home park, for god's sake. What was a mobile home but a big boxy car without an engine? Her old beat-up Datsun, parked on four flat tires in front of the mobile home, was like a little annex, a mother-in-law apartment.

The seats did not exactly recline all the way, but they reclined quite a bit. The only hard part was trying to find a comfortable place to lay her head, because it tended to roll back and forth on the hard surface of the headrest as she relaxed. After a couple of hard nights she finally worked out an arrangement of pillows that held her head in place comfortably. That and a sleeping bag and she was all set. She knew that she might be sleeping this way for a while, so she safety-pinned clean sheets into the inside of the sleeping bag and took them out every week and laundered them.

The car's battery was run down but it still had enough juice to run the radio, so it could be said that the Annex had a home entertainment system. Sometimes Eleanor would sit there and listen to a little music, or to news of the presidential candidates. Looking out the windshield, she could see into her neighbor Doreen's trailer and see the candidates running around on Doreen's TV set on top of the fridge. When she watched TV in this way, from a great distance, through layers of dirty glass, unable to hear the sound, it had a weird, pixilated look to it. There were so many politicians going so many places, doing so many cute things to get the attention of the cameras. It was like a nursery school, she thought, full of lonely kids who were always punching each other, running with sharp objects, and sticking pencils up their noses - anything to draw attention to themselves. The TV producers, like overburdened nursery-school teachers, cut frantically from one three-second shot to another, trying to keep track of them, and all their little activities. Each cut made the image on Doreen's TV set jump, startling Eleanor a bit and making her eyes jerk involuntarily toward the screen.

So that was why kids couldn't stop watching television.

The candidates did not seem to have much of an attention span. As the weeks went on, most of them ran into trouble of one kind or another - a poor showing in a state primary, a scandal, or money woes - and dropped out. It always seemed momentous at the time of the actual announcement, and when Eleanor saw a candidate standing somberly in front of some blue curtains, she would turn on the Annex's radio and listen for news of his withdrawal. But a few days later she would realize that she could hardly even remember the candidate's name or what he stood for. And it got to the point that whenever one of the candidates made his little withdrawal speech, she would say, "Good riddance," and snap off the radio.

Eleanor Richmond was sleeping in her car because there was no room left in the mobile home. It only had two bedrooms. Until recently, she and Harmon had slept in one and their children Clarice and Harmon Jr., had slept in the other.

Now everything was discombobulated. Harmon had killed himself. Harmon, Jr., had taken to staying out late. Clarice had remained stable and reliable, a good girl, for a few weeks following the suicide, and then one night she had not come home at all.

And then Eleanor's mother had moved back in with them. Eleanor spent about half of one night trying to sleep in the same bed with her mother before going out into the living room, where she found Harmon, Jr., sacked out on the couch. From there she had gone straight to the car.

Eleanor loved her mother, but her mother had died a long time ago. Only the body lived on. The Alzheimer's had started when she was in the first retirement community. The nice one. The expensive one. By the time they were forced to move her into the not-so-nice one, she had deteriorated to the point where she had no idea what was going on, which was a blessing for all concerned.

Now she was home with Eleanor. She was back in diapers. Mother didn't mind, but Eleanor certainly did - and the children couldn't handle it at all. Eleanor hadn't seen much of her children since Mother had moved in.

With other kids, that would have been worrisome. But Eleanor's kids weren't like that. She had raised them the way Mother had raised her. They had their heads on straight. Even when Clarice stayed out all night, Eleanor felt confident that she was using her head and not doing any of that stupid underclass behaviour.

Harmon Jr., was a case in point. He had been horrified that first morning when he found his mother sleeping in a car. He had tried to insist that he be the one to sleep outside. Eleanor had put her foot down. She was still a parent; Harmon, Jr., was still her child. It was the parent's duty to look out for her children. No son of hers was going to sleep outside, not while she could help it. Harmon, Jr., eventually backed down. But the next day he came home with some sheets of silvery plastic stuff that he had brought at an auto parts store. He went out to the Datsun and stuck this material up on the insides of all the windows, turning them into one-way mirrors. From inside the car, it just tinted the windows a little bit. But from, the outside, no one could see in.

Eleanor really liked it. She liked to come out here and snuggle into her sleeping bag, lock the doors, and He for a while, gazing out the windows. Usually when you went to bed, you were blind. If you heard a mysterious noise outside the window or in the house, you felt scared and helpless. You had to get out of bed and turn on all the lights to find out what was happening. Here in her silvered bubble she could see everything, but no one could see her. If she heard a noise, all she had to do was open her eyes, and she could see that it was a cat scratching in the dirt, or Doreen coming back from her evening shift at the 7-Eleven. And if it was anything more than that, she had Harmon's old officer's .45 sitting in the glove compartment right in front of her, practically in her lap. Eleanor had spent a few years in the Army herself and she knew how to use it. She knew exactly how to use it.

When money got short and times got hard, you stopped worrying about all the superficial nonsense of modern life and you got down to basics. The basic thing that a parent did was to protect her family. That is why Eleanor Richmond felt more comfortable, and slept much more soundly, in her silverized glass bubble with a loaded gun six inches away. Whatever else was going wrong, she knew that if anyone tried to get into her house and hurt her family, she would kill them. She had that one base covered. Everything else was details.

Her eyes came open in the middle of the night and she knew that something was wrong without even turning her head.

The Commerce Vista ran right up to the edge of the highway, and it didn't have any of this exit-ramp nonsense. One minute you were going sixty miles an hour and the next minute you were skidding across yellow dust and broken glass, trying to kill speed. Whenever someone performed this maneuver, Eleanor heard it and opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was always the white aluminium front of the mobile home. If the car then turned on to her particular lane, its headlights would sweep across the surface.

It had just happened a few seconds ago. And now she heard footsteps crunching in the gravel, right outside of the car.

She lifted her head slowly and quietly. A man was walking in front of her car. A beefy, bearded white man, young-looking but with the bulk of middle age, dressed in jeans and a dark windbreaker, wearing a baseball cap. He moved confidently, as if he belonged in her front yard, as if he belonged on her front step.

Which he definitely did not.

Eleanor had practiced this; she had been ready for it since the first night in the Annex. As the man was mounting the steps to their front door, his back turned to her, she rolled out the front door of the car, dropping to her knees, pulling the gun out of the glove compartment, and took cover behind the corner of the mobile home, sighting down the side of the house, drawing a bead on the center of the man's windbreaker. From here he looked exactly like a silhouette target at the firing range.

He hadn't heard her yet. She raised her head for a second and looked at his car. It was a beat-up old sedan with no one else in it. The man had come alone. His mistake.

"Freeze! I'm covering you with a .45," she said. "I'm an Army veteran and I have fired hundreds of rounds into targets that were a lot smaller and farther away than you are."

"Okay," the man said. "Can you see my hands? I'm holding them up."

"I see 'em. Why don't you lace them together on top of your head and then turn around to face me."

"Okay, I'll do that," the man said. He did.

"What are you doing here?" Eleanor said.

"My job."

"You a robber?"

"No. I'm a cop. Detective Larsen of the Commerce City Police Department."

"Can you prove that?"

"I can prove it by showing you my ID," Detective Larsen said. "But in order to do that, ma'am, I'll have to take it out of my pocket, and it would be a shame if you misinterpreted that as reaching for a gun. So let's talk about this for just a second and see if we can negotiate a way for me to extract the ID from my pocket without giving you the wrong idea."

"Don't worry about it," Eleanor said, pointing the gun up at the sky and coming out from behind her cover. "Only a cop would talk like that."

"Well, let me show you my ID anyway," Larsen said. He turned sideways so that she could see his butt. He slowly reached around into his back pocket and took out a black wallet. He underhanded it twenty feet to Eleanor, then left his hands well away from his sides while she opened it up and looked at it.

"Okay," she said, tossing it back. "Sorry if I spooked you."

"Normally I'd be real pissed," he admitted. "But under the circumstances, ma'am, it's all right. You Eleanor Richmond?"

Larsen's face went all fuzzy and out of focus. Eleanor's eyes were filling up with tears. She didn't even know why, yet. "I got the feeling something real bad happened," she said.

"You're right. But it's going to be okay, considering."

"What happened?"

"You son is in the hospital in serious but stable condition. He's going to be all right."

"Car crash?"

"No, ma'am. He was shot."

"Shot!?"

"Yes, ma'am. Shot in the back by a suspected gang member, in downtown Denver. But he's going to be okay. He was very lucky."

Suddenly Eleanor was seeing clearly again. The tears had gone away. It was so shocking that just for a minute, curiosity over­whelmed everything else.

This was terrible. She should have been freaking out and panicking. Instead, she felt eerily calm and alert, like a person who had just been sucked out of an airliner into a cold, scintillating blue sky. Her life was completely falling apart now. She felt the complete abandon of a person in free fall.

"My son was shot and you're saying he's lucky?"

"Yes, I am, Mrs. Richmond. I've seen a lot of people shot. I ought to know."

"Detective Larsen, is my son in a gang and I don't even know about it?"

"Not as far as we can tell."

"Then why did they shoot him?"

"He was using a pay telephone downtown. And they wanted to use it."

"They shot him over a pay phone?"

"As far as we can tell."

"What, my son wouldn't let them use it?"

"Well, no one uses a pay phone forever. But he didn't give it up as quickly as they wanted him to. They didn't want to wait. So they shot him."

She frowned. "Well, what kind of a person would do something like that?"

Detective Larsen shrugged. "There's a lot of people like that nowadays."

"Well, why are our presidential candidates running around having sex with bimbos and sticking pencils up their noses when we have people growing up in Denver, Colorado with no values?" Detective Larsen was looking progressively more bewildered.

"Presidential politics aren't my speciality, ma'am." "Well, maybe they ought to be."

A few weeks later, Eleanor found herself sitting on a rather nice, brand-new wrought-iron bench in front of the Boulevard Mall in downtown Denver. She was in no mood to be at a mall, but circumstances put her here a couple of times a day.

Her son was convalescing, and taking his sweet time about it, at Denver County Hospital, which was a mile or so down south of the state capitol and the high-rise district. This part of town included the hospital, various schools, and museums - all of the municipal stuff. It also included the old downtown shopping district, which had been badly in need of some really devastating urban renewal for quite some time.

Just recently the urban renewal had come in the form of the Boulevard Mall, a brand-new pseudoadobe structure built on the bulldozed graves of more traditional retail outlets. It was near Speer Boulevard, only a few blocks from the hospital. A lot of bus lines converged there. Denver had hired some publicity genius who had come up with a catch phrase for the bus system: The Ride. This being the automotive West, where only tramps and criminals were thought to take public transit, the buses were slow, few, and far between, and so Eleanor had been spending a lot of time taking The Ride lately, or waiting for it, which was even more humiliating.

She consoled herself with the fact that it made sound financial sense. Sitting down with her calculator, like the banker she had once been, and weighing all the alternatives, she eventually figured out that the most logical way for her to spend her time was to take The Ride downtown twice a week, to this neighborhood. Along with all of its municipal buildings, it included a few big old mainline churches, several of which had gotten together and started up a food bank. Originally it was just to help Mexicans live through the Rocky Mountain winter, but in recent years it had started to attract a more diverse clientele. So while Eleanor was out of the house picking up cheese, powdered milk, oatmeal, and beans, Doreen was keeping an eye on Mother. In return, Eleanor gave Doreen some of the food and watched Doreen's kids for a couple of hours a day. This was known, among intellectuals, as the barter economy.

Since the shooting, she had added an additional stop: she would go out and visit Harmon, Jr., at Denver County Hospital. Harmon had learned, from his father, to hold his feelings inside and not complain about things, so sometimes it was hard to tell how he really felt. But he seemed to be doing okay psychologically, much better than Eleanor would have been if she had been shot in the back for no reason. As Harmon, Jr., came out from under the shock and the effects of the drugs, he got his old spark back, plus a little bit of a macho swagger that had not been there before. He had been shot and he had survived. That was one way to get a name for yourself in high school. The macho bit was cute, as long as he didn't take it too far.

Thinking of her son made Eleanor smile to herself as she sat on the bench in front of the Boulevard Mall. Across her lap was a large brick of orange cheese encased in a flimsy cardboard box, and several pounds of rolled oats and pinto beans in clear plastic bags. Above her head was a large sign in red metal saying THE RIDE.

All around her, people were strolling in from the parking lots, converging on the front entrance of the mall. These people had their very own rides, many with licence plates from outlying counties. She got more than one dirty look from these people. This was not unusual in Denver, which now had its ghettos at the outskirts of town, but even for Denver it seemed like she was getting a lot of dirty looks. Then she realized that every other one of these people was wearing a T-shirt or a baseball cap emblazoned with the slogan EARL STRONG COMES ON STRONG.

Everybody knew that Earl Strong's real name was Erwin Dudley Strang, but no one seemed to care, and that was just one of the many things about the man that pissed Eleanor Richmond off.

Not that there was anything wrong with changing your name.

But political candidates had been crucified in the press for doing far less significant things. Earl Strong/Erwin Dudley Strang seemed to get away with murder.

He could have picked something a little less obvious than Strong. To change your name, and then use the name's double meaning as part of a campaign slogan ... it was a little much. As if he were nothing more than a new TV series. But even though people knew exactly what Erwin Dudley Strang was doing, they lapped it up like thirsty dogs.

Maybe one reason Eleanor felt bad when she heard of the man was that she had known of him from way back and she had never taken him seriously.

The first time she had ever seen the name Erwin Dudley Strang, it had been printed across the laminated face of a photo ID card. She had seen it through the distorting lens of the peephole on the front door of the house in Eldorado Highlands. She was on the inside of the house, by herself, waiting for the cable TV installer to show up; the cable company had promised that an installer would arrive between nine and five, and so she had spent the whole day waiting in an empty house. He had finally rung her doorbell at 4.54 p.m. and stood out on the front doorstep holding up his official cable TV installer's ID card so that it was the only thing she could see through the peephole when she looked out.

She could at least pride herself on one thing: she had known, just from that one little gesture, that Erwin Dudley Strang was a creep.

She opened her front door. Erwin Dudley Strang lowered the badge to reveal a narrow, concave face, cratered like the surface of the moon. He looked Eleanor Richmond in the eye, and his jaw dropped open. He stared at her without saying anything for several seconds. It was the look that white people gave to black people to let the black people know that they didn't belong there. To remind them, just in case they'd somehow forgotten, that they were on the wrong continent.

"Can I help you?" Eleanor said.

"Is the lady of the house in?" he said.

"I am the owner. I am the lady of the house," she said.

Keeping that fixed stare on her face, Erwin Dudley Strang blinked a couple of times and shook his head melodramatically. But he never said anything. It almost wouldn't have been so bad if he had said, "Shit, I never thought I'd see a black person out here." But he didn't do that. He shook his head and blinked, and then he said, "Yes, hello, I'm here to install your cable TV."

In the course of installing the cable system he had to go in and out of the house half a dozen times. Each time, he was careful to stare her down while standing in the corner of her peripheral vision so that she would know that he was there. Each time, she felt herself getting hot under the collar and turned squarely toward him, and each time he glanced away just a moment before her eye met his, blinked, shook his head, and continued about his work.

He walked around the house brandishing a power drill with a preposterously elongated bit, which he used to drill holes all the way through the exterior walls wherever she told him she wanted a cable TV wire. Even the way that he handled this tool raised Eleanor's hackles; it seemed clear, somehow, that a large portion of Erwin Dudley Strang's ego was bound up in this tool, and that penetrating the walls of total strangers' homes was the really swell part of the job as far as he was concerned.

And consequently he always pushed on the drill a little bit too hard, tried to make it happen a little bit too fast, and ended up shoving the drill bit through the wall with brute force rather than waiting for it to cut cleanly; everywhere he poked a hole through the wall he managed to burst a sizable hole through the drywall, and every time he did it, he came back in and shook his head in astonishment as if this were the first time it had ever happened. As if defective drywall had been used to build the Richmonds' new house, the Richmonds had been foolish enough not to notice, and there was not a thing he could do about it.

He ran the cables along the outside of the house, not by stapling them but by tucking them between the pieces of vinyl siding. As a result they all fell out within the first couple of days, leaving gaps in the siding where it no longer interlocked properly. Harmon ended up spending an entire weekend fixing the holes in the drywall and reattaching the cable to the house and getting the siding popped back together. Harmon also noticed that Strang had neglected to ground the cable system properly, which put the whole family at risk of electrocution, and so he rigged up a way to ground it to a cold-water pipe down in the basement.

All of this was in defiance of Erwin Dudley Strang's statement, which he repeated to Eleanor several times, that the stuff was cable company property and they were not allowed to mess with it in any way.

"It's all hooked up," he said, at some point when he had arbitrarily decided that he was finished. "Now, if you'll show me your TV, I'll hook it up for you."

The Richmonds had not moved into the house yet. There was not a stick of furniture in the house, or for that matter in the whole development. Erwin Dudley Strang had passed through every room in the place and must have noticed this. Now he was asking to see their television set, staring at her blankly, with the forced innocent expression of a sixth-grade bad boy who has just nailed the teacher with a spitball.

She was just completely baffled by the man. Clearly, what he was saying had no relationship to what he was thinking. He was playing some kind of game. She had no idea what it was.

"It's not here. We haven't moved in yet," she finally said. Mother had taught her, when in doubt, to be polite.

"Well, then I can't show you how to hook it up."

"It's cable-ready," she said. "All we have to do is screw the cable in the back and turn it on."

"And plug it into the power outlet," he corrected her, just a hint of a smirk on his face.

"Yes, and plug it in. Good point," she said.

"Now, is it ready for all bands of cable? Because the bands here might be different from the bands there."

She had been expecting something like this. Telling Erwin Dudley Strang that their set was cable-ready was tantamount to making fun of his drill bit. He could not let it go unpunished. He would have to one-up her and display his technical mastery.

"From the bands where?" she asked.

His eyes darted back and forth. Clearly this was something of a curve ball. "Wherever y'all came from," he said, putting a long, drawling emphasis on the "y'all."

"If you don't know where we came from, how do you know that the bands are different?"

"Well, you came from back East, didn't you? From one of them big cities?"

"No. We were at Fitzsimons Army Medical Center for a couple of years. Before that we lived in Germany."

"Oooh, Germany," he said. Then, moving so suddenly that he made Eleanor startle, he stood up straight, clicked the heels of his work boots together, and jutted his right arm out in a Nazi salute. "Sieg Heil!" he hollered. He dropped his arm and a smile spread across his face as he watched Eleanor's reaction. "Lots of those kinds of people there? You know, National Socialists?"

"You mean Nazis?"

"Well, that's kind of a slang term, but yeah, that's what I mean."

"Never saw one there," Eleanor said. "If you're finished, you can leave now."

Strang raised his eyebrows fastidiously. "Well, technically speaking, I'm not finished with the installation until I have hooked up the TV set and gotten it running to the satisfaction of the owner."

"My husband is an engineer. He'll get it running. If we're not satisfied, we'll call the cable company."

"But before I leave, I have to get your signature on this docu­ment," Strang said, holding up an aluminium clipboard, "which states that the installation is complete and you are satisfied with the quality of service."

"I'll sign anything, at this point."

"You sure?" Strang said, wiggling the clipboard just out of Eleanor's reach.

"Positive."

"We could test it right now if you could get a TV set."

"For the eight hundredth time, I do not have a TV."

"I'll bet you could get one, though."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

Strang looked out the windows of the living room, down the block. "Must be some other houses around here that have TVs. I'll bet you could figure out a way to get your hands on someone else's TV set, if you really wanted it."

She just stared at him, narrowed her eyes, shook her head in amazement.

He continued, "Course now that y'all are out here in the nice part of town, I'll bet you don't do that kind of thing no more. But I'll bet you still got the skills. Y'all are just a little rusty."

"I'm gong to call the cable TV company and they are going to fire your ass," she said.

"They can't," he said. "I don't work for them. I'm an inde­pendent contractor. Just a small-time entrepreneurial businessman struggling to make my way."

"Then I'll make sure they never hire you again."

"Your word against mine," he said, "and even if they believe you, there's plenty of other cable systems out here in Colorful Colorado that keep my services in high demand."

She knew it was crazy for her to be arguing this with him. She should just throw him out of the house. But her parents had raised her to talk things out. They had worked their fingers to the bone paying for an expensive Catholic education so that the nuns could teach her to be a rational, intelligent citizen. She could not get over the impulse to make Erwin Dudley Strang see reason. "Why shouldn't they believe me?" she said. "Why would I bother to call in such a complaint? It's not something I would do for fun."

"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," he said.

"What!?"

"I seen the way you been looking at me," he said. "If you want a taste, why don't you just ask for it?"

"Oh, Jesus," she said, "get out of my house. Get out now. Just get out."

"Upstairs bedroom has some nice carpet in it. Almost as good as a bed."

Then she astonished herself by kicking him in the nuts. Hard. A direct hit. His mouth formed into an O shape, his eyes got big, he stuck his arms down between his thighs, sank to the living room floor, and lay down on his side, sucking in quick, short breaths through his puckered lips.

She went right out to her car, rolled up the windows, locked the doors, and started the engine.

After a few minutes, Strang came out, walking in little tiny baby step, climbed gingerly into his van, and after sitting there in the front seat for a few ominous minutes, backed out of the driveway and went away.

Later they found out that he had forged Eleanor's signature on the work order form. She didn't care.

The next time Eleanor saw Erwin Dudley Strang, he was on television, his name was Earl Strong, and his complexion was frighteningly, unnaturally smooth, as if he had been lovingly spackled, buffed, and polished. The white skin of his cheeks was luminous under the lights of the television studio, and almost fuzzy, like an off-focus beauty shot of an aging movie star. As if the camera could not find any feature or blemish to focus on.

She saw his face on the local public-access cable TV channel one night when she was flipping through the channels after Harmon and the children had gone to bed. It went without saying that the cable had never worked perfectly ever since Strang installed it. It was always a little snowy, with a bit of fuzz in the audio, and whenever the wind blew, the picture started to jump. But putting up with bad television was preferable to phoning the cable TV company and having them send him back to fix it.

It was creepy and ironic to be flipping through the channels, cursing the bad reception, cursing the man who had installed it, and suddenly to have him show up on screen, in a full talking head shot, wearing a business suit.

She looked at him for a moment and flipped on to the next channel. She didn't want to see the man. So he was wearing a business suit. He had found some other profession to give a bad name to. She didn't care.

But a few nights later she saw him again, and this time the letters EARL STRONG were superimposed on the bottom of the screen, and finally she had to stop right there and watch.

It was some kind of talk show. Not a slick network production by any means. Just a sheet-metal desk in front of a big piece of blue paper with a Goodwill sofa next to it where the guests sat.

But Earl Strong/Erwin Dudley Strang wasn't sitting on the sofa. He was sitting behind the desk, in a cheap folding sheet-metal chair that creaked whenever he shifted his weight. He was the host.

Eleanor had to go and dig up the little channel guide, the little slip of cardboard that Strang had given her years ago, to find out what channel she was watching. It said CH. 29 - PUBLIC ACCESS CABLEVISION.

Earl Strong was talking politics with an assortment of off-brand philosophers who drifted across his little stage, seemingly following their own cues. The camera angle never varied. Clearly there was only one camera taping this thing, and it was sitting on a tripod, running on autopilot. It was comically inept, just the kind of thing that he would throw together.

The title of tonight's broadcast was "The Three-Fifths Compromise: Error or Inspiration?" Eleanor could only listen to about thirty seconds of it before she was overcome by an odd combination of boredom and fury.

The name of the show was Coming on Strong. Earl Strong kept coming on, week after week, year after year. It seemed that every time she happened to flip past his little program, he looked a little different: he did something about those crooked teeth. Got his chin lengthened. Fixed the nose. Bought a narrower and more conser­vative set of neckties. Played endlessly with his hairstyle until he found one - close-cropped but carefully sculpted - that worked. Bought himself a chair that did not creak. Moved to a better studio, got a two-camera setup, then a three-camera setup. Got com­mercial sponsorship from Ty (Buckaroo) Steele, a prominent local purveyor of cut-rate used cars, and made the jump from public-access cable to one of the local commercial stations.

And at each step of the process, Eleanor laughed and shook her head, remembering him curled up on the floor in her living room, sucking in short little breaths, and she wondered how long it would take for this man to be found out for the shabby little fraud he really was. Each time he attained a little more success, Eleanor was shocked for a moment, even a little frightened. Then she calmed herself down by reminding herself that the higher he got, the harder he would fall in the end.

Surely someone would take it upon themselves to expose this man.

But no one ever did.

And then, all of a sudden, Earl Strong was running for the United States Senate, he was ahead in the polls, and everyone loved him.