Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [39]
Sonny sipped beer and watched his fellow American give a seminar in low-pressure sales tactics. Hayden was one of those people who seemed to project a glow, a kind of golden, airbrushed aura that sucked all the money and love to themselves. Never an awk ward word, never a misplaced pause; the man fairly crackled with discipline and style. “The company thinks there might be four trillion cubic feet of gas in that block,” he was saying. Four trillion cubic feet, worth how many billions? Sonny’s mind scrambled zeros like eggs. The generals listened but made no commitment, which didn’t seem to faze Hayden. When the party broke up he lingered with Sonny on the pretext of finishing his drink.
“This deal is reaching a critical point,” he confided. “I need your help.”
Sonny laughed. “Looks to me like you’re doing just fine.”
Hayden favored him with a patient smile. “Let me put it this way, Sonny—I’m covering your losses today. Whenever we’re paired together I’ll take care of you.”
Sonny despaired; was he about to hit a new low? And yet it didn’t seem like a great deal to ask.
“I’m a pro, Merrill. Maybe I’m not so much of a pro anymore, but I never…” He felt fluttery inside, vaguely airsick. “That’s just a bad habit to get into.”
“And I’d never ask you to.” When Hayden smiled, Sonny thought, he looked like a man flossing his teeth—it had no meaning except as hygiene. “Just humor me. You understand what’s at stake here.”
“I guess I have an idea.”
Hayden pushed back his chair and stood. “We’re talking about five billion dollars’ worth of natural gas—does that help clarify your thinking, Sonny? A lot of people want to see this deal happen.”
“Right,” Sonny said, as grudgingly as he could. If he blew this gig he might as well go back to Linwood and cut grass. “I won’t get in your way, if that’s what you mean,” he added, which seemed good enough for Hayden.
One morning a group of monks took up the lotus position outside the National’s main gates, blocking traffic and generally messing up everyone’s day until the soldiers hauled them off like so many sacks of mulch. Watching it all unfold from the clubhouse steps Sonny gathered that it was a protest of some kind, a peaceful demonstration against—what? Surely not against golf per se? He found himself transfixed by the monks’ seditious calm, their silence in the face of all those honking SUVs.
“The monks don’t like us,” Tommy Ng remarked. He was standing at Sonny’s shoulder, one step up.
“But there were monks at the tournament,” Sonny pointed out. “They were blessing us.”
Tommy considered. “Different monks.”
From time to time rogue faxes came over the clubhouse fax machine, broadsides from international activist groups with FREE BURMA! screaming across the front page. As a joke, or maybe simply because he could, Tommy always showed Sonny the faxes before tearing them up, leering as he flashed the illegal document like the rawest sort of porn. Often the faxes featured profiles on Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner whom the generals had confined to house arrest.
“You know, I tried to see her one day,” Tommy said, so deadpan that Sonny suspected this was another of his colleague’s vinegar-thin jokes. “I wanted to ask her what it’s like not to leave your house for seven years. Not even a walk around the block—must be weird, hunh? But the cops sort of jumped me when I turned down her street, and they were the mean ones too, you can tell because they wear those really cool Ray-Bans. I was thinking I’d made a pretty bad mistake until the captain found out I could get him a tee time.” Tommy blinked, his version of a rim shot. “We’re good friends now,” he added in an offhand voice.
Sonny could add two and two; he could connect the dots. Driving around town on his rare days off he could see the cops and soldiers on every street corner, the barbed wire, the checkpoints and goofy mind-control