Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

she was ashore, and she was embarrassed for him to see its accumulation of junk. Predictably, the stack of photocopies she’d just made at the library reached its limit of stability as Cyril walked away, and the whole pile slumped over onto the passenger-side floorboard, leaving a single sheet on the seat.
    Abby’s face, looking coyly over one shoulder for all eternity, stared up at Faye as if to remind her that everyone turned to dust sooner or later. She might as well gather some good times, some friends, a lover, a family, something worthwhile to occupy her mind until the dust called her home.

    Cyril shouldn’t have been surprised to find Alice sitting at his breakfast table in his kitchen. The woman knew no boundaries, and he supposed that was a good thing in a campaign manager. She was a superlative predictor of human behavior and that was a campaign manager’s single most important quality. She could predict how any given event would sway the voting populace and, apparently, she could also predict that, after two hours outdoors in August and an hour in the car driving back to Tallahassee, he would go home for a shower before putting in a late night at the office. The key question was how she knew that he’d been sitting outside sweating, when he’d been doing it in a miniscule town’s deserted park, many miles away.
    On cue, Alice said, “There are a negligible number of voters in the big city of Panacea, and they’re all very, very loyal to you. Why waste your time there?”
    Good old, single-minded Alice. No thought, no action, no breath was to be taken without considering its effect on the next campaign. And this time she was looking toward the United States House of Representatives. If Alice lacked a sense of humor before, she was positively funereal now.
    “I felt like taking a drive. I think better behind the wheel.”
    “Do you think better in the company of a woman who could, with a single inopportune photograph, ruin everything? Being seen with Faye Longchamp could sink your campaign.”
    “Do you ferret out the names of all my dates?”
    Alice gave him her patented you-idiot look. “Of course. And their addresses and phone numbers. But Faye doesn’t seem to have those things. My investigator—”
    “The one you hired to tail me, so you can make sure I date ‘appropriate’ women? Alice, that’s sick.”
    Alice, who knew no shame, kept talking. “My investigator tried to follow her home, but it didn’t occur to him that he might need a boat, so he had to watch her ride off into the Gulf without him.”
    Cyril opened his refrigerator and pulled out a beer. He didn’t offer one to Alice. His rude gesture would have carried more weight, but for the fact that Alice didn’t drink. “So she outmaneuvered your private eye. Big deal. You hire cheap help,” he said, swigging a tremendous gulp of brew. Maybe if he made this bottle of hop juice look as completely satisfying as the beer commercials did, Alice would learn to drink and lighten up a little. “Why don’t you go ahead and say it out loud? Why don’t you want me to date Faye?”
    “Come on, Cyril. It’s hasn’t been forty years since the Civil Rights Act passed. The bad old days aren’t that long gone. Those people are not all dead yet. They’re still out there and they still vote. You cannot date a woman of color and be elected. Not in Florida and not in most states in the union.”
    He had known from the outset that Faye was the kind of woman who would cause Alice to blanch. Actually, Alice herself would object to neither Faye’s character nor her skin color, but she wouldn’t hesitate to point out that he had constituents who would. Well, bullshit. A lot of his constituents were black, thanks to Douglass Everett’s efforts. And another large fraction of his voters wouldn’t bat an eye when their Congressman was sworn in with a woman of color on his arm.
    “You love it when I’m seen with Douglass Everett. How is Faye different?”
    “A black friend makes you look worldly and broadminded. A black girlfriend—” Alice responded to his impatient gesture, saying, “All right, a biracial girlfriend, then. It’s immaterial. An inappropriate girlfriend—whether she be the wrong color or too young or married or an ex-convict—makes you look like a man who thinks with his penis.”
    Cyril didn’t call her a racist, because he didn’t think she was one. Alice judged people by only one criterion: whether they were