“What is it you want, Willie?”
Palmer Stoat had waited until they reached the back nine before bracing the cagey vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.
And Representative Willie Vasquez-Washington replied: “What kind of fool question is that?” He was looking at a four-footer for a double bogey. “Makes you think I want something?”
Stoat shrugged. “Take your time, Willie. I’m on the clock.” But he was thinking how he’d undercharged Robert Clapley for the job, because one hundred grand was seeming more and more like a dirt-cheap fee for spending a whole wretched day on the golf course with Willie Vasquez-Washington.
Who, after missing his putt, now asked Palmer Stoat: “Is this about that damn bridge?”
Stoat turned away and rolled his eyes.
“What’s the name of that island again?”
“What’s the fucking difference, Willie?”
“The governor told me but I forgot.”
They rode the cart to the eleventh tee. Stoat hit first, slicing his drive deep into the pines. Willie Vasquez-Washington sculled his shot fifty yards down the right side of the fairway.
“What is it you want?”
Sometimes Stoat was too direct, Willie thought. The question had sounded so common and venal, the way it came out.
“It’s not about wanting, Palmer, it’s about needing. There’s a neighborhood in my district that needs a community center. A nice auditorium, you know. Day-care facilities. A decent gym for midnight basketball.”
“How much?” Stoat asked.
“Nine million, give or take. It was all there in the House version,” said Willie Vasquez-Washington, “but for some reason the funding got nuked in the Senate. I think it was those Panhandle Crackers again.”
Stoat said, “A community center is a fine idea. Something for the kids.”
“Exactly. Something for the kids.”
And also something for Willie’s wife, who would be appointed executive director of the center at an annual salary of $49,500, plus major-medical and the use of a station wagon. And another something for Willie’s best friend, who owned the company that would get the $200,000 drywalling contract for the new building. And another something for the husband of Willie’s campaign manager, whose company would be supplying twenty-four-hour security guards for the center. And, last but not least, something for Willie’s deadbeat younger brother, who happened to own a bankrupt grocery store on the southwest corner of the proposed site for the community center, a grocery store that would need to be condemned and purchased by the state, for at least five or six times what Willie’s brother had paid for it.
None of this would be laid out explicitly for Palmer Stoat, because it wasn’t necessary. He didn’t need or want the sticky details. He assumed that somebody near and dear to Willie Vasquez-Washington stood to profit from the construction of a new $9 million community center, and he would have been flabbergasted to learn otherwise. Pork was the essential nutrient of politics. Somebody always made money, even from the most noble-sounding of tax-supported endeavors. Willie Vasquez-Washington and his pals would get their new community center, and the governor and his pals would get their new bridge to Shearwater Island. A slam dunk, Palmer Stoat believed. He would arrange for Willie’s project to be inserted into the next draft of the Senate budget, and from there it would easily pass out of conference committee and go to the governor’s desk. And, his private concern for the Shearwater development notwithstanding, Governor Dick Artemus would never in a million years veto the funding for a community center in a poor minority neighborhood, particularly when the elected representative from that district could claim—as Willie Vasquez-Washington had at various times—to be part Afro-American, part Hispanic, part Haitian, part Chinese, and even part Miccosukee. Nobody ever pressed Willie for documentation of his richly textured heritage. Nobody wanted to be the one to ask.
“I’ll fix everything tomorrow,” Stoat assured Willie Vasquez-Washington. “Listen, I’m kind of late for a meeting at the capitol.”
“What’re you talkin’ about, ‘late’? We got eight holes to play.” Willie was gesticulating with a three iron. “You can’t quit in the middle of a fairway. Specially when I’m down twenty-six bucks!”
“Keep the money, Willie, and the cart, too. I’ll walk back.” Stoat hung his golf bag over one shoulder and took a beer from the cooler. He gave a genial but firm wave to the vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, then began the trudge to the clubhouse.