Not long afterward Clyde Banks began to think about career issues again. It was time to move up in the world or find another line of work. The only way to move up was to run for Forks County sheriff in the 1990 election. This would mean putting his boss, Kevin Mullowney, out of a job. Mullowney was a Democrat. Clyde Banks had no choice but to grit his teeth and become a Republican. The Republican party was glad to have him, but there weren’t many Republicans in the area, and the party did not have alot of money.
So Clyde Banks had to do some serious thinking about inexpensive campaign strategies. He was thinking about them at six-thirty A.M. on the morning of March 1, 1990, as he stood in his kitchen, browning one pound of ground beef in a large black iron skillet. He had just come off the night shift and was still wearing his brown uniform. The walls were making a hissing, whining noise as hot water rushed through the pipes; Desiree was taking a shower. If he stepped away from the stove and got his head out of the column of grease vapor rising from the skillet, he could get a whiff of the peachy stuff she used on her hair.
On the counter next to the stove there was a big piece of white paper that had until recently beenwrapped around the ground beef. It had MARCH 01 90 stamped on it in several places. Next to it was a stack of three other white paper bundles, each one of which contained a single sirloin steak and was also stamped MARCH 01 90.
The first thing that the Big Boss had done when she’d got out of bed that morning was gone to the freezer, which was stacked from the bottom to the top with bundles wrapped in white paper, and sifted through them until she had found the four items stamped with today’s date. Clyde would never have even thought of doing this; none of their meat had expired in at least two months, and it was neither his habit nor Desiree’s to go through the freezer memorizing all those little blue numbers. But Desiree, with her all-consuming Nesting Instinct, somehow knew, as if ghostly voices had been calling to her all night, that the spirit of the steer that had given up the ghost at Lukas Meats a year or so ago was haunting her to make sure he had not given up his shanks, loins, gams, or whatever, just so they could be thrown away. So now Clyde was browning this meat that had to be consumed before the stroke of midnight lest it turn green and purulent. The steaks were waiting on the counter. Desiree was going to drop them off at the neighbors’ house on her way to work, shifting the moral burden onto their shoulders.
She came out of the shower with her hair wet, smelling of peaches and something sharper mixed in with it. She was wearing one of Clyde’s bathrobes because none of hers would go around her big belly anymore, and even Clyde’s had to be fixed with a safety pin in order to stay closed.
“You are an amazing creature,” he said, turning to look at her, continuing to stir the meat with his other hand. The Big Boss just crossed her arms over her breasts, on top of her belly, and smiled at him.
“Remember we have class tonight,” she said.
Clyde wanted to make a disparaging comment about the class, in which a nurse from Methodist Hospital, a woman with long gray hair parted in the middle, who lived with another woman and a lot of cats on a farm near Wapsipinicon, told Clyde and Desiree and a bunch of other couples how to breathe. Clyde had had a lot of confidence in Desiree’s breathing skills to begin with, as she had been doing it for more than thirty years now without any significant interruption. But even his first gently snide comment on the breathing class, a couple of months ago, had led pretty quickly to tears on her part, reminding him the hard way that as soon as he and Desiree had decided to get pregnant, they had entered into an area of incredible tenderness where he was poorly equipped to do or say anything without causing lots of emotional damage. So now he just followed the Big Boss around with his hands down at his sides, taking small steps, not saying much, and it seemed to work pretty well.
“I’ll be back for it,” he said.
“You gonna start today?” Desiree said.
He hesitated for a second and then said, “Yup,” which, now that he had said the word to his wife, meant that he was committed for good. Clyde Banks was running for sheriff.
Chapter Two
James Gabor Millikan woke up every morning at six and did not move a muscle of his body thereafter for fifteen minutes. He always found the transition from the unconsciousness of sleep to the exquisitely controlled existence of his waking life to be frightening. He lay rigid, eyes open, as he ran through the checklists of his life with the same thoroughness as a pilot preparing a 747 for a transpacific flight.