Walter stood up and ran down their waitress and asked to have their entrées boxed for takeout. Lalitha was still slumped forward, her half-finished third martini by her elbow, when he returned to the booth. He roused her and held her firmly by the upper arm as he led her outside and installed her in the passenger seat. Going back inside for the food, he encountered, in the glassed-in vestibule, his tormentor from the bathroom.
“Fucking dark-meat lover,” the guy said. “Fucking spectacle. What the fuck you doin’ around here?”
Walter tried to step around him, but the guy blocked his way. “Asked you a question,” he said.
“Not interested,” Walter said. He tried to push past but found himself shoved hard against the plate glass, shaking the framework of the vestibule. At that moment, before anything worse could happen, the inner door opened and the restaurant’s hard-bitten hostess asked what was going on.
“This person’s bothering me,” Walter said, breathing hard.
“Fucking pervert.”
“You going to have to take this off the premises,” the hostess said.
“I ain’t going nowhere. This pervo’s the one that’s leaving.”
“Then go back to your table and sit down and don’t use that kind of language with me.”
“Can’t even eat, he makes me so sick to my stomach.”
Leaving the two of them to sort things out, Walter went inside and found himself in the crosshairs of the murderously hateful gaze emanating from a heavyset young blonde, clearly his tormentor’s woman, who was alone at a table near the door. While he waited for his food, he wondered why it was tonight, of all the nights, that he and Lalitha had provoked this kind of hatred. They’d received a few stares now and then, mostly in smaller towns, but never anything like this. In fact, he’d been agreeably surprised by the number of black-white couples he’d seen in Charleston, and by the generally low priority of racism among the state’s many ailments. Most of West Virginia was too white for race to be a fore-front issue. He was forced to the conclusion that what had attracted the young couple’s attention was the guilt, his own dirty guilt, that had radiated from his booth. They didn’t hate Lalitha, they hated
Back at the Days Inn, he carried Lalitha in his arms through the rain and set her down outside her door. He had little doubt that she could have walked, but he wanted to indulge her earlier wish to be carried to her room. And it actually helped to have her in his arms like a child, it reminded him of his responsibilities. When she sat down on the bed and toppled over, he covered her with a bedspread the way he’d once covered Jessica and Joey.
“I’m going to go next door and eat dinner,” he said, tenderly smoothing her hair from her forehead. “I’ll leave yours here for you.”
“No don’t,” she said. “Stay and watch TV. I’ll sober up and we can eat together.”
In this, too, he indulged her, locating PBS on cable and watching the tail end of the
He himself had been under tremendous pressure to get the Trust’s contracts with Nardone and Blasco signed before their initial agreement with Vin Haven expired, on June 30, and became subject to renegotiation. In his rush to deal with Coyle Mathis and beat the deadline, he’d had no choice but to sign off on the body-armor deal with LBI, exorbitant and distasteful though it was. And now, before anything could be reconsidered, the coal companies were rushing to wreck the Nine Mile valley and move into the mountains with their draglines, which they were free to do because one of Walter’s few clear successes, in West Virginia, had been to get the MTR permits fast-tracked and persuade the Appalachian Environmental Law Center to remove the Nine Mile sites from its dilatory lawsuit. The deal was sealed, and Walter now needed to forget about West Virginia in any case and start work in earnest on his anti-population crusade—needed to get the intern program up and running before the nation’s most liberal college kids all finalized their summer plans and went to work for the Kerry campaign instead.
