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k k k k k k k k k k k	BLACK HELICOPTERS EPISODE 26 FRIDAY the SEVENTH - 8:16 PM The Eagle's Nest was a dark, smoky old oak-paneled German dive that had flouted State and Federal mask, vaxxing and tobacco laws as vigorously as its decor defied woke. Steins portraying big-bosomed Rheinfrauleins (crafted to hold three, maybe four liters of suds) lolled on wallshelves (patrons were restricted to the smaller one liter tankards) accompanied by brooding mountain murals interspersed with numerous stag and boar heads - dead, glass eyes staring down with contempt upon the politicians hunkered over a dark, dim table in the darkest, dimmest corner of the Nest – at which Glenn, Anne, Tom Beedle and Burt Weston slurped cabbage soup and gnawed sausage appetizers, faces dark and dour as the bread and heavy, ancient table. Talking purposefully as glasses, steins and silver clinked and clattered and rattled in the background while, to all sides, delegates and tourists chattered.	k k k k k k k k k k k

"So," Weston said, "the tide slowly turns towards third, maybe fourth-party advocates if... if Rayna's people and Tillerman's can put aside their differences, and if ambition is elevated before principle."

Pretentious bastard, Glenn thought, wiping his mouth with a slice of black Bavarian bread. Populist fudd... doesn't even wear a belt like decent people, suspenders!... wants people thinking him some backwoods lawyer like fuckin' Matlock. The days occurrances had left him in a sour mood.

Anne repressed a smile at Weston’s ignorance of the real factor determining a Democratic or third party strategy, the only factor as she had been made aware of, recently and repeatedly… then lay her spoon down. "Tom," she said, "what can you tell me about that Texas delegation? I mean... do these people have any responsibility to the membership back home? It seems a microcosm of everything we've been trying to avoid!"

"Well, that's so! Damn!" Beedle added, as a slimy noodle slipped from his fork and slithered down the length of his cream and crimson tie. "Sorry! Enjoy it while you can...” he waved the fork, “just in case we win and Jack really does go off the deep end, appoint Bloomberg surgeon general to ration calories! There's very little most of these delegations have to answer to once they've arrived, except the Chairman or, in our case, Cat... I mean, Chairwoman. We need a lot more letters going out to the responsible elements, a lot more! All of this should have been taken care of a month ago, but Jack would just chew on his fuckin' toothpick, tell some phony baloney story about Ol' Mort or some dogs; nothing gets done, time flies and Rayna keeps staring at him with those bedroom eyes, writing out checks..."

"You cash yours, don't you?" Weston interrupted.

"Damn straight! Just like you... all of us do..."

"But we're not in any trouble, are we?" Glenn wished aloud, "so long as we get the right vote out of the Credentials task force?"

"Rayna's her own worst enemy," Beedle assured them as he dipped his napkin into clear Eagle's Nest water and dabbed at that repulsive tie. "Going out of her way to piss off Tillerman into linking up with the craziest Tea Partiers to form a fourth party, putting on that Lincoln Mafupia or whatever, who goes on about black singers, dancers and athletes going out on strike over Halloween and bringing Babylon to its pasty white knees. He ain't talking Iraq, either! Worse than those gang-politician mullahs in Chicago. Than the Squad! And that welfare mother this afternoon... baby-breeding machine, the one who says our after-school activities plank's racist? Not Tillerman's special schools... ours! The sort of argument that belongs outside. Anne, as the resident expert on our Coloradans, just what is the last thing in the world those Aryan posy-sniffers want... more people like her representing the Coalition on TV? Those fucks from five and eleven, they sell footage to their networks, you know, and come October somebody drags it out to beat us over the head with..."

Weston fingered his craggy chin. His whole face, in fact, seemed composed of slabs of rock piled atop each other this way and that, with no apparent master design; he tried to make a circle of his fingers but produced only a sagging quadrangle. "We're supposed to be the doughnut coalition, remember - we need the minorities to balance out the racism of Austin's radical environmentalists. Uppity minorities, even. Don't think Rayna doesn't know what she's doing. I just don't know if the third party advocates... especially all those California people... really understand."

"So while we're running me down," Beedle snapped, "just how do the numbers stack up? Anne?"

"Give me a moment," she said, donning her glasses and spreading out one of the thick, embossed napkins, somewhere between damask and paper... the Eagle's Nest being an expensive excursion for their Coalition credit cards. She removed a pen from her purse. "To begin with, three hundred seventy-four delegates, not counting any super-delegation from the host city, number still to be determined..."

"Ratso's pipe dream!" Beedle scoffed. “Burt, I could understand – but shouldn’t you be toting up the results on a BlueBerri?”

"Malfunctioning,” she sneered. “Again! And just because it’s Chinese, doesn’t mean that Russians can’t be watching. Or Peter Thiel or Betsy Devioso’s brother with those people that find out things about people and then kill them. Well, we'll hold off on that... might work more than one way, if it must. Now... with the Indiana, Michigan and South Carolina challenges," Anne continued, "we have twenty eight, more or less, up in the air. First, I'll break it down if the challenges fail, as we hope and expect..."

"They had better damn well fail..." Glenn growled, tossing down the rest of his goblet of the Eagles' Nest’s best yellow wine and refilling it from the pewter ewer at the center of their table.

"OK, ix-nay on comments from the peanut gallery! Ready?" Anne toted up. "First, our people... versus what's left of the old guard. As near as I can tell, Catfish has two twenty eight, Tillerman only a hundred thirteen. Thirty-three legitimately undecided. Now... what about our two hundred twenty eight? One forty-nine committed to at least a pretense of working with the Democrats; by that I mean entering a candidate in their primaries and keeping the gloves on against whatever oozes out of Congress and the statehouses or the old folks’ home – not to mention Hollywood - through to the convention and then supporting the party nominee unless she… to make a leap of political faith, or intelligence… turns out to be somebody truly repulsive in an effort to poach the Republican base. A left-wing Sara Palin? Good ol’ Bern? That Mayor in Minnesota who wants to abolish the police?”

"Your Dimmycrats have a talent for doing just that," Burt warned, hooking both thumbs in those folksy red suspenders he favored. “That Oprah muletrain gets back on the rails and we can all go home for eight more years and sit on the front porch, whittlin’ and waiting for our checks.”

"Well we can't blame the voters. Rayna can count on sixty-nine of those and there are about ten more who haven't made their minds up yet." Tom Beedle licked his lips at mention of the first figure, as if to make a wisecrack that he, then, decided to leave unvoiced.

"So..." Glenn ventured, "after the candidate is chosen, we only have to hold on to thirty, thirty-five percent of Tillerman's people… the fourth-party lunacy excepted…"

"That's what I'm working on." Anne put her pen down, took a sip of wine and smeared liver paste over a rye cracker.

"What about the challenge delegates?" asked Weston.

"That's where things get difficult. Oh... thank you," Anne said as the buxom waitress arrived with their main courses; steaming platters of sauerbraten, roasted rabbit… head on, teeth bared, eyes glaring at the politicians accusingly… multicolored wursts, krauts and dumplings which sat, cooling, as she totaled up the votes. "First, the candidate. We have twenty four of those twenty eight... three are undecided and there's one kook whom we'd lose, from Indiana..."

Weston dismissed the prospect. "Any state elect gomers like Dan Quayle and Mike Pence to public office... wouldn't trust 'em anyways!"

"OK, this gets hard to figure," Anne cut him off. "These are mostly Rayna's people, I count fifteen undecided, the minorities. The whites are a bad lot, I think it could go as much as eleven-two against. They don't fit in. Matt Moss, you know, he heads up that bunch wanting to bring the Superbowl back to free TV? Single issuecrats... they don't belong, they're running against the rules that got them here in the first place... I don't know what to make of them, and I hope I don't have to find out!"

"How many of the twenty-four are ours?" Beedle backed up.

"Between eighteen and twenty. I don't even think about knowing where the challenge delegates would go... again, I hope that I never have to find out.

"But they'd never get together and gang up on us, would they?" Glenn fretted. "Tillerman and Rayna? If something bad went down between her and Jack up in their Ivona penthouse like between those kids in Wyoming… although she’d be the one with the hatchet," he rolled his eyes.

"Longshot!" Anne said, crossing her fingers anyway. "They've had absolutely nothing in common. That old Colorado mob are almost all white except for a coupla right-wing casino-crazy Native Americans too bugs for Bugsy Siegel, even... well off, mostly in it for quote unquote environmental reasons. They've made or inherited theirs, they don't want the view from their vacation cottages in Aspen or Vail mucked up by bunkhouses for clerks and dishwashers or, of course, the coal miners and their daughters. That’s why they posture as friends of those Mexican immigrants living in trailers out by the dump. Wine-tasters and artisan pot-smokers... old Mitt Romney starlings who'll flirt with Generals Milley, McRaven or McChrystal or even Chris Christie or, knock on wood, Jeb, but flutter back into the nest after they’ve been Trumped..."

"Typical 'Publicans!" Weston popped a slab of sauerbraten in his mouth, spitting out a gristly obscenity through his crooked teeth.

"Well, the funny thing is that Rayna has a few jack Republicans... and I am speaking both ways... what they're doing together I honestly don't know. They go up to the penthouse and talk about Teddy Roosevelt and Hiram Johnson... leftover McCain and Goldwater people, probably; all seem to come out of Arizona and Utah, Nevada and those godawful California boonies. A few Alaskans too, think Palin sold out to the bastard New York liberals… drivin' round in pickup trucks, shooting everything in sight... wise-users, be in Jack's pocket except they're for repealing civil rights, shoot-to-kill at the border and, probably, for the poll tax. The Ron Paul, as against Rand Paul, people. Borderline alt-Libertarians. Give them a balanced budget, a national initiative and recall system and a wall around Mexico, and they're happy."

"I can handle that!" Glenn spoke up confidently. "Some people are just against any system, whatever it is!"

"Well, like flocks to like and, like Rayna, all of 'em are miles from the rent-stamp office," smirked Beedle, who'd eschewed the wine in favor of quaffing lager from a special stein, a smaller version of the wall art, embellished with fierce boars, grapevines and leaping stags. He smacked his lips, winking... "the rest of her bunch, the queers and minorities, women, they're the real outsiders. Maybe they'll just split off and walk once she's finished reaming them, except they'd have to borrow bus fare to get home. None of them have money... how the hell did so many get elected out of California anyway?" he shook his head. "Gang kids... waiting for 2Crazy to get serious about that Apprentice feud and join the party? Or dirty old Jerry Brown – back in the Governor’s rocking chair after Newsome survived his recall and Joe rewarded him with Kerry’s job? He turn ninety yet?"

"Well, that was where the system broke down." This was one of Anne's favorite war stories, and she drew it out with mouthfuls of wine and nibbles at her pickled carp. "Things all started in the caucuses last year, where Catfish and Tillerman made that compromise allocating the number of state representatives based on financial support, but electing the actual delegates by a popular vote. That's where Tillerman got took!"

This made Tom Beedle chortle. "That's why people still persist in underestimating the Catfish! They think he's just a rich, spoiled fake country boy with a legendary papa who couldn't hack Congress... and all the while he's watching them, keeping his eye on how people are thinking. Anticipating... I know, why else would I be out hustling money from Tillerman's people in their Hollywood closets? Because money, in this case, does not translate into power. The fact that television's nature boy doesn't want to be outed as a racist, but will write up a ten thousand dollar check through some front, combined with all those forty-dollar votes that Joe Berkeley and Sally from the Valley kick in adds up to millions; throw in all those whale-saving, kale-munching silicon millionaires up north too gone in the head worrying over their pet banks to realize Jack means it when he talks about taxing robocalls and using the IRS to whale the crap out of the rich and give it to the dolphins... all these give us a whole heap of votes, how many..."

"Fifty-one," Anne said, without checking her little notebook.

"OK," Beedle acknowledged, "but the actual membership, in numbers, isn't much more than in Michigan, Ohio - all those places Trump won after Sanders ran strong back and before that when John... ‘scuse me... Howard fuckin' Dean actually polled in double figures after the scream. So it's bad... but it's split, which means that the badness is good. How good is it?"

"Well, like you say... the bad news is that we have five, maybe six certain votes." Anne began toting up the figures on an Eagle's Nest napkin, refilling her wineglass. "But say... out of forty two delegates who've declared what they'll do... not that I'd ever take the word of a Californ!" she smiled at Tom Beedle, "...only eighteen are Tillerman's and half those owe their fealty to Governor Moonbeam. The rest are Rayna's. Not Jack's, mind you, Rayna's," she looked up, smiling, tossing off the entire contents of the goblet at once. "Their membership fees make them hers, but we didn't count all the expense of the field operation. Rayna paid for out of her own pocket against that!"

"Why?" Burt Weston coughed. "Sendin' people out door to door, whole lot of them, joined with the Coalition or not, bought some cold cream or toenail polish... and all of that went off the books."

"It was legal!" Anne defended her patron.

"I pulled in thirteen mil from those people," Tom Beedle complained, "almost half that in those four stadium benefits, for which I put my credibility on the line," the lawyer reminded them. "Still get nightmares some rapper or grunge band will figure up what went down, come after me when this is over, waving their guitars like clubs... though I see why celebrities all fawn over the Catfish. He's interesting! Tillerman wrote his book first, but Jack made the New York Times top-fifteen list and Austin didn't. These people don't read but they follow trends... Jack was on both the Jimmies, on Oprah’s fifth-to-last show before the bankruptcy and political epiphany; chewed the holy hell out of Bill Maher and O’Reilly’s talking heads, the both of ‘em and, once this circus is over, he’s scheduled for that fuckin’ Colbert. We're on the short list to host Saturday Night Live before the election, where it counts. Celebrities think differently than we do, they sort of operate on vibes, like plants. And I had a fifty-fifty shot of getting Springsteen into this sorry burg if Rayna here hadn't ticked off Ratso by squashing his demand for host city super-delegates..."

"Host delegates!" Glenn slapped his forehead, "why not call them Ratso's ghost delegates! Hostage delegates! The grubbiest of power plays and we don't need the votes!"

Anne refilled her glass and said, icily: "Glenn, how many votes?"

"Well, the state has eleven delegates. If they wanted more, they should have opened their pocketbooks. It's a great bunch, eight firm, only one definitely bad, and Potter and the Senator have been terrific. I suspect the Mayor here hopes Catfish would put him on the ticket as Vice President, assuming Tillerman declines..."

"Never happen!" Burt Weston shook his head. "Pinhead's a drunk. Not a slick going-for-the-gusto, rat-pack high lifer like our Jacks… Parnell or Kennedy… just a mean, sloppy, ass-groping, vomiting Rob Ford alcoholic, bless his Canadian Club soul."

"Well he's not helping Henri any. Ratso... that's what they call Henri here... he asked for nineteen delegates. Maybe he deserves thirteen. He wouldn't budge, so he got zilch, and that's what the credentials committee will tell him too, nothing! Unless we change their minds..."

"Well, I trust Anne to keep the score in case that has to happen," Beedle said, mopping his face with one of the strangely textured napkins, "...still, I'm disappointed, after all the work you two and Henri put in together, that you would treat him like..."

"Don't blame me!" Glenn snapped. "You're the ones who let Pat O'Neraghty run wild, the way he does all over the country. We lost money because people were afraid of him, and the state lost delegates..."

Anne sipped more wine, watching the accusations bat from Glenn to Beedle and back. "You're speculating..." the lawyer accused.

"Am I? What about Watson Morrow! He's really the big wheel here, the big developer with big money and big plans now that the plagues and bank crises are winding down and housing and shopping mall markets are starting to turn around. He and the Mayor are like this..." and Glenn twisted his thumbs and fingers together.

"Tell me something I don't know," Beedle needled. "Morrow's one of Pinhead's patrons... like I ought to be, hanging with the heavy pocketbooks instead of having to work these technical details."

He threw his napkin to the floor for the Germans to pick up.

Anne set her empty goblet on the table. "Peter Pinhead Potter picked his patron's porky pockets? How many punk pink pocketbooks did pickled Pinhead Potter pick?"

Beedle had to chuckle. "Not many... not after Red Pat finished his presentation. Morrow's with us... solid... on foreign policy, and some of the environment, as it applies to places not here, but he still supports the death tax as an alternative to the savings or a national property tax, which has to be Tillerman's strangest nod to populism. If we make the platform too explicit, he might be useful in unexpected ways...”

"Peter Pinhead's poppy rat-prack patron pickle picked more potted, spotted platforms?"

"Anne, don't drink anymore," Glenn admonished as she picked up the pewter pitcher and refreshed her wineglass. "You know how it affects you!"  

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