“The Bad Angel brothers,” Zangara said, straightening his jacket, coming to attention, with a little salute, touching his hat brim in homage. A high school nickname is forever, and it annoyingly defines you when you’re still living in your hometown. “You guys are fabulous.”

When this sunny visitation ended, and Zangara left the diner, Frank seemed to subside and become smaller, twisting himself back into his seat, to resume toying with his food. He’d fallen silent, but still was not eating.

I watched him resisting his food, and his stubbornness made me recall his slights and abuses when we were younger. In my angered imagination I pictured myself dragging him out of the booth and violently force-feeding him. It was the way an imprisoned hunger striker was fed, first immobilized, strapped to a six-point chair, a nasogastric feeding tube pushed into his nose and snaked into his throat, and nutritious slop hosed into him, while he gagged and struggled to breathe. Force-feeding had been used many times, by the U.S. and others on prisoners, and it was deemed torture—cruel, inhumane, and degrading, and sometimes fatal—but torture as a fine art, making it especially pleasant for me to contemplate with Frank (who once mentioned to me that he approved of it), intubated and choking to death and unable to speak, or to tell me another bullshit story.

“McBride later joined the D.C. branch of my old law firm.”

I needed to remind myself that this was the father of the senator Dad had apparently insulted.

“Became a lobbyist.”

Frank launched into a vaguely familiar story about lobbying, setting up businesses on Native American tribal land in Idaho, leasing agreements and financial schemes, saying, “Some of that land is fractionated,” and repeating the phrase “Cash is king.” But as he was still poking at his food—sculpting it, so to speak—and not eating, I could not understand his story. I knew I had heard it before, something about casinos, but this time it had a different emphasis that got my attention and seemed personal. “Mineral rights,” he kept repeating, and I wondered whether he was referring in some enigmatic way to the cobalt deposit I’d discovered in that same area of the state. Yet as long as he pushed his food around his plate, and did not eat any of it, I was too distracted with my fantasy—force-feeding him to death—to follow his story.

To get him to stop, I said, “Do you want anything else?”

“Yes,” he said. “I want to find the rich jerk who took a dump on me—kept me waiting in an outer office for almost an hour, seeming to take some pleasure in it, and then snubbed me when he deigned to see me. ‘We’ll get back to you. Have a nice day.’”

“When was this?”