Free Political Timber by Chris Lynch

night, no Sweaty tonight.
    Anyway, I had Mosi. My parents hopped into the backseat together, and let Mosi ride up front like he was my date. He was wearing a maroonish suit that clung to his big short arms and thick neck like he was growing right out of it before our eyes. And though we were on our way to dinner, he came packing a gigantic bag of Smartfood.
    As I warmed up the Tourismo in the driveway—regardless of the weather, you let her idle for exactly four minutes or you are abusing her—Mos sat in the passenger seat, bearing down on the popcorn like a horse with a feedbag.
    “What’s up with you?” I asked, whispering a little bit lower than my folks were whispering and giggling in back. I turned on the radio, but nothing would come out of it until the tubes heated up.
    “Nuth,” he garbled.
    “Look at me, Mosi.”
    He looked up. Popcorn cheese ringed his mouth and sprinkled his eyebrows like fairy dust. The eyes themselves were dewy and unfocused. I sniffed him.
    “Jesus Christ,” I snapped.
    “What is it?” my father asked.
    The radio, warmed, blasted in out of nowhere. The four minutes was not quite up, but I threw the car in reverse, apologizing to it as I did.
    “Nothing, Dad. Mosi just has popcorn cheese on his suit, and he looks like a dick !” I snarled.
    “Gordon!” Ma gasped. Dad and Mosi seemed not to mind.
    “Want some Smartfood?” Mosi asked, swinging around and aiming the bag at my parents.
    I swiped the bag out of his hand, threw it out the window. “No eating in the Studebaker. I told you this a million times.”
    “A little nervous about tonight, son?” Ma asked.
    I grunted.
    “What’s that sound? What’s that sound I hear back there?” I was just asking for dramatic effect. I knew very well what the sound was, just as I knew the Hawk’s every sound. It was the creaking of the tiny spring that holds down the lid on the mini-ashtray in the rear door handle. “There’s no smoking in the Studebaker, Dad. You know that.”
    I watched his laugh lines in the mirror. He was enjoying himself. “Used to be able to smoke in the Studebaker,” he said, grandly draping his arm over my mother’s shoulders.
    What is it about this car that makes guys do that?
    “In fact,” he reminisced, “everybody did. My dad would be tooling along in the front seat on a Sunday afternoon, one arm around my mom, beeping and waving at everybody we passed. He really was king back then, I’ll give him that. Anyhow, he’d have a big old stogie stuck in his kisser, Mom would be smoking a tiparillo—she was a maverick herself—and me and my sister would be all scrunched down in back sharing a butt out of the ashtray.”
    Dad paused to laugh at his story. “With the top down, and all the parade-waving they did, my folks never even knew what we were doing back there. Everybody in town saw us smoke except our own damn parents, heh-heh.” There was an extra little twist to that last laugh that was kind of chilling.
    “Awesome story, Mr. Foley,” Mosi doofed.
    “Ya, really cool, Dad. But you still can’t smoke now. Times have changed. New regime. Get with the program.”
    He booed me. I was a high-school kid, last in the poll, on his way to make a speech to adults with money. My date, who was not pretty enough to get away with it, smelled like a Rastafarian priest. And my very father was booing me.
    “It’s called preaching to the converted,” Bucky said, in an effort to calm me down. “It’s the easiest thing in the world. You don’t have to win anybody over. This is your grandfather’s core of support, his inner circle. They love him, they love you. And all two hundred of ’em have paid a buck fifty apiece to prove it.”
    “Two hun... at a hundred fif...”
    Bucky stood patiently, waiting for me to defeat the equation. He couldn’t wait any longer.
    “Gord, has anyone mentioned to you that the mayor has to manage a one-hundred-million-dollar budget?”
    “Jesus, I wish people would stop