A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [14]
During those hard days, my vice president, former Texas senator Matt Hope, held in line that massive group of voters of the Christian conservatives. Taking on Hope as V.P. meant I did not have to personally deal with those pompous preacher men guarding the kingdom. Vice President Hope quickly convinced the Christian constituency they had no place else to go. Certainly, Governor Quinn Patrick O’Connell, a Catholic liberal, represented an unthinkable alternative.
It is election day minus seven. Perhaps I’m grasping, but I sense that the sudden dry-up of news out of O’Connell’s headquarters means something. Although we are separated by two thousand miles, I sense a tension and quandary.
I had given O’Connell a hell of a run. Whatever hope I had was squashed at our “great debate” at the New York City Public Library. During an intermission at the end of the first hour, I was informed of treachery that would send me packing out of office.
Well, Thornton Tomtree, how did you get here? How did I get enmeshed in a tragedy that was not of my making? Why have I had to live to the great betrayal?
Even back in the 1950s, I never wanted to be much more than a junkyard dog, like my daddy, Henry Tomtree, who knew every scrap of metal, every bale of newspaper, and every dead battery and doorknob in his yard, and who could carry on business without calculator or ledger because he kept everything in his head. Henry Tomtree was the greatest junkyard dog the Northeast states ever had.
How old are your first memories? Vaguely, around kindergarten or first grade. I loved the yard so, I didn’t have many friends on the outside. Suddenly, I was in big classrooms with them, boys and girls. One day I was standing before our long hall mirror in our hallway. I remember finding it hard to look at myself. I was different from the other kids. Even looking in the mirror I wanted to defend myself from outside inspections of me.
In my early grades I had a terrible time in school. Studies were fine and simple. It was lunch period, the cafeteria, and the playground where I was not spared perpetual taunting.
And as they taunted, I ran to my safe place in a corner of the junkyard. It was here that I began to build my empire. I studied my daddy’s ways. I fiddled endlessly with physics problems. I became able to play both sides of a chess game in my mind.
If you can’t crack a problem through logic, you make an end run. I developed an auxiliary to standard mathematics, my own methods. I slipped in and out of quantum math.
All this I had in me, but I could barely hold up my hand in class or engage in conversation or, God forbid, approach a girl. I was interesting, but nobody knew the things I was interested in.
I was storing so much data and so many formulae that I had to have a place to hold it all. So I created a fantasy place. It was called Bulldog City, although it was really a nation, in an isolated place with mountains encircling it and mountaintop guard posts and missile emplacements. I invented a super laser to knock out incoming missiles and spy planes. I could even hit a satellite when it spied on Bulldog City. Boy, nothing could get in and out, and I commanded the armed forces and quarterbacked the football team and sang concerts and all the stuff I couldn’t do.
My daddy’s partner was a Negro named Moses Jefferson. Moses was a spiritual gentleman who did odd jobs until he proved his true worth. Moses entered a secret bid to demolish the old Williams Hotel. His bid was lower than Henry Tomtree’s.
Moses didn’t have the money for a crew and equipment, but subcontracted everything and put them on a profit-sharing plan. He ended up with an enormous cache of sinks, pipes, toilets, bricks, fine old turn-of-the-century urinals, chandeliers, railings, and everything a petit grand hotel could yield.
Henry Tomtree had been skinned, but he got the message. Moses Jefferson possessed the keen mind of a junk dealer. As messy as the yard might appear, a good dealer had it organized in his head, down to a button. Hell,