At eleven-thirty, guests from all over the state of Kansas begin to arrive. Men in Sunday suits take out hip flasks and add gin to the lemonade. It would have been bootleg gin, wouldn’t it? The twenties were Prohibition years, weren’t they? Not that it matters. Boys in knickerbocker pants and girls with hoops. Barking dogs. A banner says SIGN AND GIVE TO SAVE SWEETBRIER and snaps in the breeze. Or perhaps the day was windless. This doesn’t matter, either. At twelve, the dancing begins. At one, the senator’s vast bulk irons down the grass across the lawn on the way to his speech. ‘Timing’s everything,’ the senator used to say. ‘Get the timing right and you got your public fucked before you lay down a penny.’ He stops here to shake a hand and there to bend his public smile over a lady’s glove. He makes a perilous stoop from the waist to accept ice cream from a girl in ringlets.

Photographs of Senator George Stoke at the age of sixty-two are not pretty. Some fat men look well-contained. Not George Stoke. He oozed. His lower eyelids gaped; they exposed their angry red interiors, which showed not red but black in the grainy black-and-white newsprint of the time; they seeped. The flesh hung over his starched collar as moist and flaccid as rotting pork. He carried a walking stick that ended in an open-mouthed snake with a real snake’s teeth and pearls for eyes. He wore a frock coat, shiny at the elbows and cut to a pattern that had gone out of style nearly thirty years before. This frock coat was important to him – and it’s important to me and to what goes on hereafter. He’d worn one like it throughout his career. Everybody knew George Stoke’s frock coat. Everybody knew his monumental vulgarity, too; he worked hard at it. He jiggled with glee when he shocked the strait-laced and the starched. ‘See this litmus paper?’ he’d ask one such. ‘I’m gonna put it up to your face just like this, right? And by the’ – oh, what a deliciously hideous, famous, favorite phrase: oh, how long in my life I’ve wanted to use it and never, never once, found just the right meeting of opportunity and, well, what? courage? confidence? – ‘And’, said George Stoke, Democrat of the state of Kansas, essential bit of plumbing in the United States Senate for more years than anybody could remember – ‘by the quivering cunt of the unfucked mother of Christ, it’s gonna tell me whose ass you had your nose stuck up last night.’

But it was more than words. This Senator Stoke was a cobra of a politician. He knew what he wanted; he knew what was right for the people who voted him in, and he saw no reason to modify it for anything or anybody at all. He lulled his enemies into comfort, then squeezed them dry and threw away the husk. He’d survived in politics for a long time. He’d been re-elected again and again according to laws that in any civilized society would have ruled him out to begin with. But then there aren’t any civilized societies, are there?