For seventeen years, the Fort Stockton Mud Hens had managed to avoid the Dixie League playoffs with a consistency that, viewed from the proper distance, almost qualified as excellence. Other clubs occasionally collapsed. Other clubs rebuilt. Other clubs endured a bad season or two before some nineteen-year-old shortstop arrived from Venezuela and carried them somewhere interesting. The Mud Hens simply remained the Mud Hens. They generally played well enough through Memorial Day to encourage optimism, poorly enough through July to correct it, and by Labor Day had usually reached the comfortable stage of the season when nobody in Fort Stockton needed to consult the standings before making weekend plans.
This had not prevented the town from loving them. Fort Stockton understood failure better than most places and had long ago discovered that winning was not a prerequisite for cold beer, hot dogs or an argument over whether the manager should have pulled a pitcher two batters earlier. The Mud Hens played at Cactus Field, where the lights attracted every moth in Pecos County and the public-address system had sounded as though somebody were announcing from inside a grain silo since 1989. Attendance depended less upon the standings than upon the weather, the price of beer and whether Second Baptist had scheduled anything that evening.
Then, for reasons nobody could adequately explain using baseball statistics, the Mud Hens began winning.
The reason, according to Angus Hopper, was Trixie.
This theory had originated at the back table of the Grounds for Divorce in May, when Angus noticed that Stitch Jackson, the Mud Hens’ twenty-three-year-old rookie pitcher, had stopped walking batters shortly after he began spending nearly every waking hour with the proprietor of the Klip-N-Dye. Stitch was six-foot-three, broad across the shoulders, narrow through the waist, and possessed a right arm that had attracted scouts despite a minor-league record suggesting he had only a vague idea where the ball was going. He had come to Fort Stockton from Oklahoma with a fastball in the mid-nineties, a curveball that occasionally frightened even him, and the sort of control problems that caused spectators behind home plate to pay closer attention than spectators ordinarily should.
Then he met Trixie.
Trixie was considerably older than Stitch and considerably less concerned about it than everybody else. She had the auburn bouffant, hoop earrings, figure and magnificent self-assurance that had made the Klip-N-Dye one of the few businesses in Fort Stockton where a woman could go in for a shampoo and emerge three hours later knowing who was getting divorced, who should be getting divorced and who was waiting until after hunting season to announce it. She had been married, unmarried, courted, disappointed, delighted and discussed. She had reached the enviable stage of life when scandal no longer damaged her reputation because scandal was already included in it.
By June, she and Stitch were inseparable. He sat in the Klip-N-Dye between starts while Trixie worked. She sat behind the Mud Hens dugout when he pitched. They ate at the Grounds for Divorce, danced at the Lucky Lady and occasionally disappeared for entire Sunday afternoons in a manner that made Monday morning statistics unusually interesting.
Stitch’s ERA fell from 5.12 to 3.06.
By July, it was 2.41.
By August, he had fourteen wins, led the Dixie League in strikeouts and had thrown two shutouts.
The Mud Hens were in first place.
Angus regarded the statistical correlation as conclusive.
“Boy’s finally relaxed,” he announced one morning at the Grounds for Divorce.
“He’s twenty-three years old,” Rex Hall said, lowering his coffee. “What did he have to relax from?”
“Being twenty-three.”
Rex looked toward Trixie, who was sitting three stools away. “You honestly believe she’s responsible for his earned-run average?”
“I’m saying Nolan Ryan would’ve won eight hundred games if he’d met Trixie.”
Trixie turned slowly on the stool. “Angus?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“You’re approaching the limits of my affection for you.”
“Understood.”
Lucinda topped off his coffee. “You passed those limits ten minutes ago.”
Nobody could prove the Trixie Theory, but by late August nobody particularly wanted to. Fort Stockton had discovered pennant fever for the first time in seventeen years. Mud Hens caps appeared at Rex Hall Drug. Lucinda put the standings beside the cash register. The Stockton Telegram-Dispatch began sending an actual reporter to games rather than calling the clubhouse the following morning. Mayor Goodman proposed a parade, was reminded that the team had not actually won anything, and formed a parade feasibility committee instead.
Everything came down to a three-game road series against the Little Rock Swamp Hogs, the Mud Hens’ oldest and most thoroughly disliked Dixie League rival. Fort Stockton held a one-game lead. Little Rock had the better offense. The Mud Hens had Stitch Jackson scheduled for the finale.
Trixie closed the Klip-N-Dye for the week.
The handwritten sign on the door read:
CLOSED FOR FAMILY EMERGENCY.
Nobody believed it, although several people admired the breadth of the word family.
She packed two suitcases into her 1960 Buick Electra 225 convertible and left Fort Stockton before sunrise. The Buick was one of those enormous American convertibles built when gasoline was cheap, parking spaces were generous and nobody had yet suggested that a car needed to apologize for occupying land. With the top down, Trixie headed east beneath a West Texas sky still pink along the horizon, the big Buick humming over Interstate 20 with its chrome flashing in the morning sun. By Midland, her scarf was snapping behind her. By Abilene, she had stopped for gasoline and attracted the attention of two truck drivers, one state trooper and a Methodist minister who immediately remembered somewhere else he needed to look.
The Mud Hens won Friday.
Little Rock won Saturday.
Sunday afternoon would decide the series.
The ballpark was packed.
Arkansas humidity lay over the stadium like wet upholstery. Vendors climbed the aisles with beer and peanuts. Children pounded plastic thunder sticks. The Swamp Hogs mascot, a green pig wearing bib overalls, had already been threatened by three Fort Stockton fans and one elderly woman from Little Rock who simply disliked him.
Trixie sat six rows behind the Mud Hens dugout wearing a sleeveless summer dress, large sunglasses and an expression of serene confidence.
Stitch was magnificent.
Through five innings, Little Rock did not have a hit.
His fastball was alive. His curve broke sharply down and away. His slider appeared to vanish halfway to the plate. Swamp Hog hitters returned to the dugout shaking their heads while the small contingent of Fort Stockton fans grew louder with every out. By the bottom of the fifth, the Mud Hens led 3-0, and Stitch Jackson was twelve outs away from the first no-hitter in franchise history.
Trixie should have been watching him.
Instead, she was watching a man in a dark suit.
She had noticed him during the second inning. He stood near an aisle several sections away, early thirties perhaps, trim, athletic, white shirt, conservative tie and sunglasses despite spending much of his time beneath the grandstand roof. A clear plastic tube curled behind his right ear. Every few minutes he surveyed the crowd, then glanced toward Trixie. Once, she saw him speak quietly into his sleeve.
The first time she dismissed it. The second time she became curious. The third time she smiled.
During the bottom of the fifth she got up for a beer and deliberately chose the aisle that passed directly beside him. The man watched her approach, attempted not to watch her approach, and discovered that years of federal training had not adequately prepared him for Trixie walking toward him with purpose.
She stopped directly in front of him.
“You’ve been staring at me.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then you’re not very good at lying.”
“I’m sorry?”
Trixie nodded toward the clear tube behind his ear. “Secret Service?”
The man hesitated just long enough to confirm it. “Yes, ma’am.”
Trixie looked again at the earpiece, the suit and the posture. Something shifted behind her sunglasses. A Secret Service agent was different from a ballplayer. This was a man trained to recognize threats before anyone else saw them, to remain calm when everybody else panicked and, if circumstances demanded it, to put his own body between a bullet and the President of the United States.
And he could not stop looking at a beautician from Fort Stockton.
That stirred something.
“What’s your name?”
“David.”
“David what?”
“Mercer.”
“I’m Trixie.”
“I know.”
That was the hinge.
Had he said pleased to meet you, the Fort Stockton Mud Hens might have won the Dixie League pennant. Had he nodded politely and returned his attention to the crowd, Stitch Jackson might eventually have gotten a September call-up.
Instead, he said, “I know.”
Trixie bought two beers.
By the seventh inning, Stitch still had the no-hitter.
Then came the stretch.
He trotted toward the dugout and saw Trixie waiting near the rail. He smiled and came over, flushed and sweating, still carrying the electricity of a pitcher who knew something extraordinary might be happening.
“How’s my girl?”
“We need to talk.”
There are sentences a pitcher does not want to hear while throwing a no-hitter. Your elbow looks swollen is one. The radar gun says eighty-one is another.
We need to talk may be the worst.
The conversation lasted less than a minute. Trixie did most of it. Stitch’s expression moved through confusion, disbelief and finally the hollow astonishment of a young man discovering that a 3-0 lead was not the most important thing he was about to lose.
Trixie kissed his cheek.
Then she walked up the aisle.
David Mercer was waiting.
Stitch watched them disappear through the concourse.
The first batter in the bottom of the seventh hit a fastball over the left-field wall. The second hit a slider over the right-field wall. The third hit something that had begun life as a curveball and landed beyond center field.
Three consecutive home runs.
The Swamp Hogs crowd became a living thing. Beer flew. The pig in overalls nearly suffered a coronary.
The Mud Hens manager walked toward the mound with the solemn gait of an undertaker approaching a familiar address. Stitch stood alone, staring toward the tunnel where Trixie had disappeared.
The manager held out his hand.
Stitch surrendered the baseball.
By then, Trixie and David were three miles away.
The Little Rock & Roll Bungalows stood along an older commercial strip not far from the stadium, a collection of individual motel cottages arranged around a swimming pool that had not contained water since approximately the first Bush administration. The neon sign still promised AIR CONDITIONING and COLOR TV, both technically true if expectations were properly managed.
Room 12 had a window unit that rattled like loose change in a dryer, curtains the color of nicotine and a bedspread whose pattern could have concealed most felonies.
Trixie considered it charming.
What followed was energetic, consensual and wholly incompatible with the hopes of the Fort Stockton Mud Hens.
The Swamp Hogs took the lead while Trixie and David were occupied. The Mud Hens stranded two runners in the eighth while the Little Rock & Roll Bungalows sustained activities that would have required euphemisms in the Telegram-Dispatch. Little Rock added four runs in the bottom of the inning.
Fort Stockton lost 8-3.
Neither Trixie nor David knew.
For perhaps twenty minutes afterward, the world became wonderfully quiet. The air conditioner rattled. A truck shifted gears somewhere on the highway. Trixie lay beneath the thin motel sheet, contentedly studying a water stain on the ceiling while David stared upward with the faintly stunned expression of a man reconsidering several decisions made since lunch.
Then his pager sounded.
David sat up instantly.
The transformation fascinated Trixie. The man who had been naked three seconds earlier disappeared. The agent returned. He grabbed the pager from the nightstand and read it.
“I’m needed.”
“Again?”
He was already reaching for his clothes. “Stat.”
“Is the President in Little Rock?”
“No.”
“Then who needs you stat?”
“I have to go.”
Trixie threw back the sheet and began dressing.
David stopped. “What are you doing?”
“Going with you.”
“No.”
“I’ll follow you in the Buick.”
David resumed buttoning his shirt, then stopped again. He considered the Electra 225, Trixie’s apparent attitude toward speed limits and the paperwork that might result from allowing her to conduct an independent pursuit of a Secret Service vehicle through Little Rock.
Five minutes later she was sitting in the passenger seat of his black Chevrolet Tahoe.
The Tahoe accelerated away from the bungalows with enough force to push Trixie into the seat. David drove quickly but cleanly, moving through traffic with the practiced certainty of someone who had spent years learning how to get important people away from bad situations.
Trixie gripped the door handle. “You boys always drive like this?”
“When necessary.”
“I like your job.”
She expected an airport, a motorcade or perhaps an emergency involving a former president.
Instead, the Tahoe turned toward the Clinton Presidential Center.
David accelerated up the approach, then braked hard in front of the entrance. The Tahoe stopped abruptly enough that Trixie caught herself against the dashboard.
“Who died?”
“Nobody.”
Two museum employees were waiting.
David entered briskly. Trixie followed several paces behind with the confident stride of someone who had discovered long ago that if you acted as though you belonged somewhere, most people were too polite to tackle you.
Then she saw the Cadillac.
It sat under the museum lighting in polished black silence, enormous even by the standards of the Fleetwood Brougham from which its appearance had been derived. From a distance it looked like a Cadillac. Up close it looked like somebody had described a Cadillac to the Department of Defense.
The roof stood taller. The pillars were massive. The doors appeared absurdly thick. Dark glass revealed almost nothing of the passenger compartment. Chrome, formal roofline and Cadillac ornamentation gave it the familiar dignity of a luxury sedan, but the resemblance was cosmetic. Beneath the skin was a machine designed around an entirely different set of priorities.
This Cadillac did not exist primarily to transport a man.
It existed to keep a president alive.
General Motors had spent roughly six million dollars developing the three custom presidential limousines for the Clinton administration. They represented the end of an era, the final presidential state cars whose ancestry could still be traced to a production passenger automobile before the demands of armor, communications and defensive systems pushed later presidential limousines toward purpose-built vehicles riding on far heavier foundations.
The 7.4-liter V8, specially built by Jack Roush, had the unenviable job of moving a Cadillac burdened with the mass of protection. B6-level armor surrounded the body. The ballistic windows were roughly three inches thick. The passenger compartment carried an independent oxygen supply, while fire-suppression equipment addressed the sort of emergency no Cadillac salesman ever mentioned while explaining the leather package.
Everything about the car had been conceived around contingencies ordinary owners never considered. Gunfire. Explosions. Fire. A poisoned atmosphere. The possibility that the street outside had abruptly become hostile territory.
And yet here it was, sitting quietly in Arkansas.
That itself was remarkable.
Modern presidential state cars did not ordinarily retire to museums. They were destroyed. The Secret Service had good reason. A discarded limousine could become a textbook for anybody interested in defeating the next one. Armor construction, glass, seams, door design, communications equipment and defensive systems were not historical curiosities to the people responsible for keeping presidents alive.
The Clinton Cadillac had escaped that fate, a surviving representative of the old practice of preserving presidential automobiles. But preservation came with conditions. Sensitive communications equipment and classified defensive hardware had been removed before display, and access to what remained of the vehicle was still tightly controlled.
The museum did not simply keep the keys in a drawer.
The Secret Service retained them.
David walked to the Cadillac.
He produced a key.
Trixie leaned forward.
The lock turned.
The door opened with a heavy, beautifully damped movement that immediately communicated how little it had in common with the door of an ordinary Fleetwood.
Then David stepped aside.
One of the museum employees approached wearing stark white coveralls.
Trixie waited.
The employee leaned into the Cadillac.
And dusted the dashboard.
That was all.
He wiped carefully around the instrument panel, cleaned a surface near the front seat, checked his work and backed away. David remained beside the open car supervising every movement. When the employee finished, David examined the cabin, closed the door and locked it again.
The entire operation took perhaps four minutes.
He returned to the Tahoe.
Trixie followed.
They sat in silence.
“Wait.”
David put the key in the ignition.
“Your emergency was dust?”
“Interior maintenance.”
“You drove across Little Rock like Khrushchev was back because somebody needed to wipe the dashboard?”
“Museum personnel aren’t permitted unsupervised access.”
“They don’t have keys?”
“No.”
“You have the keys.”
“The Service controls them.”
Trixie turned and looked back toward the building. “So that car stays locked all the time.”
“Yes.”
“Nobody gets inside.”
“Correct.”
“Ever.”
David looked at her.
“No.”
Trixie turned back toward him. “I didn’t ask anything.”
“You were about to.”
She smiled.
They returned to the Little Rock & Roll Bungalows.
By then, Trixie had forgotten almost completely about the Mud Hens.
That evening she learned considerably more about presidential automobiles than she had ever learned about any automobile that was not parked outside the Klip-N-Dye. David explained the peculiar afterlife of a presidential limousine. Presidents left office. Administrations changed. Technology moved forward. Threats changed with it. The automobiles that had once represented the most sophisticated mobile protection in the world eventually became obsolete, but obsolete did not mean harmless. A twenty-year-old security secret was still a security secret if it revealed how protection had once been engineered.
Trixie listened from the edge of the bed.
The more David explained why nobody could enter the Cadillac, the more interested she became in entering the Cadillac.
This was predictable.
There are people who see a KEEP OFF THE GRASS sign and remain on the sidewalk. Trixie generally regarded such signs as opening arguments.
“Take me back.”
“No.”
“After closing.”
“No.”
“Personal tour.”
“Absolutely not.”
“I’ve never been inside a presidential limousine.”
“That’s the idea.”
“You have the keys.”
“Trixie.”
“David.”
They stared at each other.
The federal government had the stronger legal position.
Trixie had other advantages.
Sometime after the museum closed, a black Tahoe returned.
The building was silent in the peculiar way museums become silent after hours. During the day, history was surrounded by footsteps, school groups, docents and people reading plaques. At night, the artifacts remained and humanity withdrew. Photographs of presidents looked out over empty galleries. Display cases reflected security lights. Air-conditioning whispered through ducts.
And beneath those lights waited the Cadillac.
David approached it with a key in his hand and regret already forming in his stomach.
The lock clicked.
The rear door opened.
Trixie climbed inside.
For the first time that weekend, she said nothing.
The interior surprised her. Armor stole space. What appeared enormous from outside became intimate within. The thick windows sat deep inside the doors. The roof felt substantial. The leather had the preserved smell of an old luxury automobile sealed away from weather and sunlight, mixed faintly with carpeting, vinyl and the sterile atmosphere of a museum artifact.
She ran her fingers across the seat.
This was where a President had sat.
Important people had ridden here. Heads of state. Cabinet members. Political allies. Political enemies. Men and women whose conversations affected countries had looked through those dark windows while crowds outside saw only their reflections.
Trixie glanced toward David.
He knew that look too.
“No.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because you keep making it necessary.”
Trixie smiled.
“Lock the door.”
History became considerably less presidential after that.
No classified equipment was disturbed. No armor was measured. No defensive technology was examined. Nothing occurred that threatened national security.
National dignity was another matter.
The rear seat of the last surviving modern presidential limousine underwent a private event for which General Motors had performed no durability testing whatsoever. Somewhere in the long chain of engineers who had calculated vehicle weight, structural reinforcement, braking requirements, armor placement and powertrain demands, nobody had included Trixie from the Klip-N-Dye in the design envelope.
Eventually silence returned.
Trixie straightened her dress.
David sat beside her with both hands covering his face.
“You all right?”
“I have violated approximately everything.”
“Nothing’s damaged.”
“That isn’t the point.”
“Nobody knows.”
“I know.”
She considered that, then looked around the rear compartment and smiled.
“You know it’s not the first time it’s happened back here.”
David slowly lowered his hands. “I am not discussing that.”
“That’s not a denial.”
“We’re leaving.”
Trixie climbed out.
David inspected the interior with the intensity of a crime-scene technician. Everything appeared exactly as it had before, or at least close enough that the republic would survive.
He closed the enormous door.
The lock engaged.
For perhaps the first time since entering federal service, David Mercer felt profound gratitude for three-inch ballistic glass.
The following morning Trixie packed the Electra and headed west.
The Arkansas humidity gave way to East Texas pines, then the long transition toward open country. By Abilene the horizon had begun stretching again. By Midland she could smell home in the dry air. The Buick’s top remained down and the big car floated over the highway while Trixie drove with one hand on the wheel and the expression of a woman returning from a successful business trip.
She reached Fort Stockton late in the afternoon.
The Klip-N-Dye remained closed.
The Grounds for Divorce did not.
Lucinda saw the Electra through the window and poured coffee before Trixie reached the door. Angus sat at the back table with Rex and Hairless B29. The sports section lay open in front of him.
The headline was not encouraging.
HENS DROP LITTLE ROCK SERIES
Trixie entered.
Every head turned.
She sat down.
Lucinda put the coffee in front of her.
For several seconds nobody spoke.
Angus finally folded the newspaper. “Stitch had a little trouble after you left.”
Trixie stirred cream into her coffee. “Did he?”
“Three home runs.”
“In a row,” Rex added.
Hairless looked up. “One of them may still be airborne.”
Trixie took a sip.
Angus studied her. “Where’d you go?”
“Presidential library.”
The table became quiet again.
Hairless looked at Rex.
Rex looked at Angus.
Angus looked at Trixie.
“During the seventh inning?”
“It was more interesting than you’d think.”
Lucinda stood behind the counter holding the Bunn-O-Matic pot. She had known Trixie too long to pursue this line of questioning without protective equipment.
The Mud Hens never recovered.
They lost four of the next six games. Their one-game lead became a two-game deficit, then four. By the final week of the season, the mathematical possibilities required so many other teams to lose simultaneously that even Mayor Goodman stopped discussing the parade.
Stitch Jackson finished 14-7.
The statistics showed a fine rookie season.
Fort Stockton remembered the seventh inning in Little Rock.
That winter, the Mud Hens traded him to the Baton Rouge Royal Raiders for a utility infielder, a player to be named later and something called “future considerations,” which struck Angus as particularly cruel considering what had happened to the present.
Stitch lasted a year in Baton Rouge. He bounced through spring training with another organization, spent part of a summer in independent ball and finally disappeared from the sports pages altogether.
Several years later, a Fort Stockton couple passing through Oklahoma City recognized him at Home Depot.
He worked in lumber.
According to them, he looked happy.
Trixie never spoke badly of him. When his name came up, she said he had been a sweet boy with a wonderful arm and left it there.
She never mentioned David Mercer at all.
The Klip-N-Dye reopened Tuesday morning.
By noon, Trixie was cutting Evelyn Hall’s hair and discussing somebody else’s marriage.
The Mud Hens returned to their familiar position in the Dixie League standings. The Governor Coke Stevenson Memorial Ballpark became quiet after Labor Day. Mayor Goodman’s parade committee ceased meeting without ever formally dissolving, which allowed him to continue listing himself as chairman for several years.
Life resumed.
But every now and then, some automobile program would come on television at the Grounds for Divorce. Maybe somebody would mention presidential transportation. Maybe a news report would show the latest armored presidential limousine crawling down Pennsylvania Avenue, enormous and black, surrounded by agents.
Angus would comment on its weight.
Rex would wonder what kind of engine it had.
Hairless would speculate whether Earl could get one at auction.
Trixie would say nothing.
She would simply drink her coffee.
Because hundreds of miles away in Little Rock, beneath the controlled lights of a presidential museum, sat an enormous black Cadillac that had escaped a fate almost none of its successors would.
The classified equipment was gone.
The doors remained locked.
The glass remained dark.
Visitors could photograph it, admire it and peer uselessly through the windows. Museum employees could clean around it. Curators could explain its history. But when somebody needed access to the interior, there was still a protocol.
Somebody had to get the keys.
And somewhere in the institutional memory of the United States Secret Service, there may or may not have been an explanation for why one particular agent was never again entrusted with them.
Fort Stockton had lost a pennant.
Stitch Jackson had lost Trixie.
David Mercer had very nearly lost his career.
The Cadillac, however, survived everything.
Which was, after all, what it had been built to do.
