For all his power and influence, not one newspaper reader in twenty had ever read the name Gwillam Forte, and not one American in a thousand could correctly identify him. Yet those who did know him-the beef barons and petroleum potentates of Texas, the power brokers in Washington, and the oil kings of Arabia-were well aware that Forte was richer and more powerful than all but a handful of them.
Governor Traynor wasn’t one of them, but if his personal fortune wasn’t great, his ambitions were. A big, heavy-boned, ruddy-cheeked, hearty-mannered politician of the old school, of the type that had been common before the trade was taken over by the cardboard creations of advertising agencies, Traynor had enjoyed a career of successive victories at the polls and competent leadership in office, the last of which he hoped would be the American presidency. He was as honest as his favor-seeking constituents would allow, rugged enough to stand the campaign rigors of cold coffee and Styrofoam chicken, and remembered that he was neither God nor His vicar, but a man who would be seeking reelection one day, and therefore as thoughtful about the future as he was diligent about the present.
“Last year, Will,” he said, “you urged me to run for the Senate this fall.”
“And you declined. I still think that was a mistake.”
“Maybe. It was a matter of loyalty, not votes. After all, Senator Gunnison helped me get a start in politics. I just couldn’t bring myself to run against him.”
“Politics is a rough game, Tom. You may have missed the boat. Gunnison will retire after this next term, and his party has picked Gallego to succeed him. That will be one tough Chicano to beat. Remember, Tom, of Texas’s eighteen million citizens, more than six million are of Mexican origin, and hundreds more stream across the border every cloudy night, thanks to the national policy of courting oil-rich Mexico by absorbing its surplus labor.
The Governor nodded. “That’s just the point. It will take some doing to keep the votes of the native Texans, yet drain enough Mexican votes from Gallego to make the Senate, Will. My statisticians and pollsters gave me a forecast last Friday: I’ll need to capture nearly 25 percent of the Mexican vote, plus a full 80 percent of the native Texas vote, or I can kiss the Senate goodbye.”
“My papers will back you.”
Governor Traynor shook his head. “Won’t be enough, I’m afraid. I’ll need something dramatic.”
“Name it.”
“Millenary celebrations.”
“Hats?”
“No. Hats is spelled with an e. This is the thousand millenary, spelled with an a.”
“Spelling aside, I don’t follow you.”
“Will, my record as governor, however excellent it might be, would not normally influence the Mexican vote to any appreciable degree. Gallego would merely say, Well then, why weren’t the Mexicans earning more?-carefully omitting to remind them that their pay was three times what their kin made back in Mañanaland. But I’ve got one hope. The Mexicans love color, they love movement-provided they don’t have to generate too much of it themselves-and they love pageantry. Anyone who feeds it to them in large doses will be remembered on election day.
“Bread and games?” Forte inquired.
“Right up to their cottonpickin’ eyeballs.” Cherokee Tom chuckled. “I’ll give ’em speeches-long flowery speeches full of big words in Spanish, speeches recalling the illustrious and bloody history of the conquistadores. I’ll give ’em barbecues, where they can step up to the table and gorge themselves on chili and tortillas and enchiladas and prime ribs of beef until it runs out of their hairy ears. I’ll give ’em parades, and fireworks displays, essay contests, beauty contests-I’ll arrange for some dark-eyed señorita to win, and crown her myself-and track meets, commemorative medals, lotteries with two-week expenses-paid trips to Old Mexico. The works. I’ll keep those wetbacks so stirred up they won’t be able to take an afternoon siesta for a year. And on election day they’ll remember who did it all for them- me.”
“Sure, Tom, but so will the native Texans. All that may remind the pale faces of just how few of us there are left, comparatively speaking. We don’t want to be reminded. And we won’t like the guy who reminded us. There just might be enough of us to cut into that 80 percent of our vote you need to go over the top.”
Governor Traynor smiled, showing the snaggletooth that was a major asset, in that it kept him from being movie-star handsome. “Got to keep you all happy too-right?”
“No other way.”
“That’s what I’m depending on you to help me do, Will,” the governor said.
“Say how.”
“I want to appeal to Texan pride, to the great Texan heritage. I want to evoke the greatness of our state.”
“I can’t write a history book if that’s what you came for. But I can write a check to a guy who can write it.”
“You can do better. You can revive a symbol of the greatness of Texas, in such a way that it’s mere appearance will electrify the electorate-I leave the details to you,” he added grandly. “You will make them remember who is preserving that heritage for them-yours truly.”
“What symbol is that, O Preserver of Heritages?”
Governor Traynor paused dramatically. “The United States Ship Texas-your old battlewagon.”
“Tom-you’re crazy.”
True, the Texas was a relic of some celebrity and antiquity. It had been given to the State of Texas after World War II instead of being scrapped, so that sentimentalists could tow it into a berth on the Houston Ship Channel and there, with much puffery and snapping of flags in the wind, christen the old ship flagship of the Texas Navy. But that had been long ago, and the ship had never since been moved an inch from its moorings. Its bottom was fouled with algae and barnacles, and it was in such deplorable condition otherwise that hardly any tourists bothered to visit it these days. As a symbol of the great state of Texas, the citizenry would find it more pathetic than inspiring.
“I couldn’t agree more,” said Traynor, when Forte confided his reservations. “But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can do something about it.”
“What, precisely?”
Traynor waved his hand airily. “How the hell should I know? I’m just a politician. I deal only in large concepts and the higher morality.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You, on the other hand, have that subterranean cave you call SD-1 full of overpaid and underemployed researchers and scientists. Not to mention your bank vaults bulging with ill-gotten gains. Put them together, and I’m sure you’ll come up with something.” He smiled an election-day smile.
“You really think this will work?” Forte asked doubtfully.
“Something dramatic-really dramatic-built around the Texas? I’m as sure of it as I am that welfare rolls never shrink.”
Forte stood up.
“I’ll work on it.”
Governor Traynor finished his drink and stood up too. He opened his old brown leather briefcase and took out a scroll, suitable for framing. He laid it on his friend’s desk.
“What’s that?”
“I knew you’d insist on helping me, Will, so I made it official. This is your commission in the Texas Navy. As of today, you’re commanding officer of the battleship Texas. Congratulations, Captain.”
14 MAY 1994:10:00 A.M.
Striding purposefully down the passageway toward the Prosthetics Research Unit of the veterans hospital on Old Spanish Trail in Houston, Gwillam Forte seemed extraordinarily fit for a man of 65. His step was springy, and his clear blue eyes and full head of tawny hair, only now beginning to silver around the edges, were those of a younger man. A plaid bow tie encircled a thick neck that sloped down to the shoulders of a weight-lifter and arms that terminated in hands equally adept at wielding a squash racquet and tying trout flies. His silver brows were too bushy, his slightly crooked nose too long, his smiling mouth too wide, his face too lined, for him to be termed handsome, yet enough lovely women had found him-and, he suspected, his fortune-irresistible for him to have wed, and almost as quickly shed, five of them, and to have loved and lost as many more. He felt as good as he looked, and wondered whether he wasn’t wasting his time coming to the PRU for his semiannual overhaul. After all, how could they improve on nature?
Over the years, they had come very close to doing so, he had to concede.
When he made his first big real-estate killing, he had set aside enough money to endow an autonomous prosthetics research unit attached to the VA hospital. The beginnings were modest: a prosthetics technician and a physiotherapist, whose mission was simply to improve the clumsy wood-steel-and-leather contraptions that were then the only substitutes for legs and arms lost by veterans. As his fortunes improved, so did the size and quality of the staff he endowed. By 1975 it peaked with thirty-five specialists, including mechanical and electrical engineers, artists, orthopedic surgeons, neurologists, mathematicians, computer programmers, psychologists, and other experts in a field they themselves created almost from scratch. In distinction to former prosthetic devices, which were basically lifeless appendages, the hands and feet the PRU designed worked by impulses from the central nervous system and feedback from minuscule sensors that replaced the missing tactile nerves.