Troutdale Kingdom – 2

“So we need you to find out what’s what out there, Rawls.” Swafford lifted his sweatsome rump from the damp-ringed desk corner. “Fuel stipend sheets are in your box. I worked out too much this morning to bring them over with me.” He stage-wiped his brow and plieed from his Rawlings cube exeunt. But not twenty seconds later his head was kilroy over the cube wall.
“Oh, one more thing. We got you a cover. You’ll love this. You ready? Okay. You’re just out of McMinnville for a white collar crime. Some fraud game. You’re criminally insane but just borderline social-wise. So, as an ap-oh-po restitution jag you’ll be shelving books for Troutdale Library. Doo-doo decimal and shit. We all know how much you love your fuckin’ books, Rawls.” A snort-guffaw was followed by a long hyena cackle, the last ten seconds of which Swafford banged on the cubicle top like a gleeful monkey with a schadenfreudic tendency learned from a twisted Goodall Jr. “You know, you being such a bookworm and all! Ah-hahahahahahahahaaaaaah! Ha, oh-oh-oh…ahhhhh,” dabbing his head his with a phantom handkerchief from another workout. “My god I love myself sometimes, Rawls. You should look into it.”
The tail-end had been vintage Swaff; the malevolence parading as bonhomie followed by the slightest locking of eyes that said ‘We both know you’ll be addicted to bottom by this cover inside a week. And let’s face it Rawls, this is a ferreting expedition of far juicier meat than the pat-ass security detail you slung on the Brady Campaign.’ And Swaff was right. The muscle memory had snapped to the moment he pulled into Cherry Park. Whatever gripes he had about aimlessness, boredom, and frighteningly sub-standard cuisine he would still be non-boozy drunk on adapting to or even transcending the cover to wring the slightest iota of use that could be made. If They could be had he’d do it. Bitch and moaning about it was just another form of vigilance. ‘This is dull but dullness is a clue of its own.’ Fact is, the living, breathing earth, as long as it was inside the urban growth boundary, is one big fat juicy clue for him. He is one of the rare fortunates whose personal constitution perfectly matches his professional prerogatives. He is a city-curious, city-loving naïve too simple-minded to be bored or jaded in any way. The city is wide open for him. Hell, doing paperwork even scratched a drutherly itch.
So he necessarily abandons the Swaff/administrative conspiracy angle in favor of what is in front of him. This is the simple-mindedness that serves. The booze has him mumbling stage-bittersweet and in-the-gut-earnest.
“They know full well I’d tail the tail of a flatulent ass for this city. For good clean god-loving elections. For freedom to all Portland City Subjects.” The tough-guy cover is run through with deep-down romantic and civic idealism. ‘Paranoia’ is just pejorative for ‘relentlessly curious.’

He looks into the high up firmament, above the massive bizarro holiday tree of the shopping center, beyond the ambient glow from Troutdale airport, I-84, and PDX, high up and beyond to the eastern glow of downtown and into the denser clutch of stars hung there. They were the afterglow encapsulated of this campaign’s first explosions. The little micro-uprisings that had been taking place for months now. The sense that Portland was opening up again, being tilted toward the good old days’ polarity, taking sides, and fighting like badgers. He hated the anti-civicness of it but, admittedly, loved the action.
Sure, there’d be logistical crampings of his conformed bachelor style at first and like always. There’d be no more peaceful porkchops in his smoke-stained corner of Mother’s. No bonus bone for Tiger from the butcher who re-diversifies into stews and soaps every campaign period. And lost his last sympathy and liberality toward in-shop pets after the Rescued Greyhound Suicide Bombing. Bachelordom being far lonelier for Rawlings with his mutt sad-eyed and shivering in another downtown vestibule, boneless while his best friend indulged in rare meats. But it would scratch City Investigator Rawling’s ripest lifelong itch: in the trenches brand of spy and skullduggery with dashes of stagemanship. Public dining with Tiger could still be had al fresco. He’d worn a rump pattern in the park block benches mixing dinner with casing, his unassigned but home-neighborhood beat. His studio refuge in the steel sky. Dead dry useless on this tail. So adjust, Rawlings. Adjust. Hunker into a cover because your long past being able to help yourself and you know it.

Hardship was part of the bargain. He was barred by ordinance from tying Tiger anywhere in Kingdom Publica. So as he dined in one of the ethnic eateries horseshoeing Cherry Park Tiger licked his chops in the rig parked outside. Not sharing meals with his boon beast caused very real pain. If he weren’t trying to insinuate himself into the hearts of the waiters and register jockeys he’d be dining al fresco with Tiger in the truck bed.
Bribes did no good. These poor suckers letter-of-the-law-ed it at profit’s expense because they were baring Downtown’s investigatory brunt for being “possible hotboxes of radicalism.” Anti-anti-immigrationists. Anti-Royists and other soccer-loving anti-b-ballists, Former-Soviet Bloc Leftos Leftier than even that Socialoid Second-runner Apologist Jefferson Smith, and all those who were and could be construed as excessively and unapologetically swarthy or somehow aligned with them. And dining in in East County, much less The Kingdom was, especially in this bloody election cycle, akin to a political statement to Downtown Investigations. After the Roy Tax Purges, the Inner Core Consolidation Project, and the consequent Bracket Extraditions (a legal and very physical brand of foreclosure that made gentrification look like Punch and Judy economics) to even take-out from one of the Outer-Core non-native eateries put you under suspicion from Rawlings’ less simple-minded peers. Hence one of his sub-covers as a devotee of greasy Cherry Park fare. God help him, he ached for some an Inner-Core Indian with the attendant passel of cuisine fashionistas and their presumed voter profile right down the pike of “Sustainably Expensive” Food Barroness Eileen Brady. Or even just a decent falafel from one of the renegade foodcarts dotting the eastern extreme of Inner Core, just barely to the left side of the border and the profile realm of former City Council member Charlie Hales, aka Senor Spanglish, aka Chucky Tightrope, aka John B. Sales. If all the political b.s. had over-soured Rawlings’ pho then Their terror bombs had cocked up his tripe. His Swiss watch metabolism was the stuff of the Samuel Adams Administration.
“So bygone…so bygone. Our culinary peak.” When he sighed his paunch rolled around for an eely three one-thousand. “Duty, Rawlings. Foof. Duty.”

So there is nowhere for Tiger to sit while he gets a good huddle in over Tapatio’s steaming plate of passable asparagus tamales or the “Pork Succulent Bowl Massif” of under-chilied but stout-noodled pad seeuw yeu from Sweet Thai Kitchen. And the fifteen minute dine-in minimum instituted in most restaurant means he won’t even catch half a quarter of the Trailblazers squinting under the grainy television in the corner of the Babushka’s ceiling). If he pushes the time-limit envelope a doleful woman in a smeared apron with an apologetic but nonetheless proprietary stink eye will essentially say ‘Much longer and I’ll have to ask you to leave. Why won’t you just do takeout like everyone else?’
He gets in the rig and Tiger, hangdogging it to the limit like always, looks up from his tangled blanket bed to meet Rawlings’ eye. He tells Rawlings he has been bored and broadly dissatisfied with the rawhide bone his head rests on and the menagerie of chew toys lovingly arranged on the dash for his supposed amusement. Couldn’t he have at least come out for a five minute session of Ball or Walk? Tiger asks these questions knowing full well there is a beef palmenyi or spicy pork bun in the bag concealed behind Rawlings’ back. After he, Tiger, manages to be polite, even just inquisitive about the warm white bag placed on and then held down by his fore-paws, he will daintily tear the paper away with his mouth to reveal a treat (“Oh boy, it is a bun!”) he will be utterly un-self-conscious about plunging his snout into and wolfing away at while Rawlings rubs his scruff and says “I know, buddy. I know. Election’s taking all the damn elegance out of the bachelor pleasures.” Front-loaded as he is by his sensual being and thoroughly ensconced in the absorption of the bun, the emotional end of Tiger will droop back to hangdog as he feels the departure of those scruff-kneading fingers half way into their getting started.
“Sorry, buddy. Duty…duty.”

Rawlings heads back towards the library.
He shadow-boxes with the wind then rope-a-dopes against a Lincoln to stare into an old Saab that hasn’t been moved in three days. Though immaculately clean inside the vehicle has that vague cloudiness and heavy feeling of a lived-in vehicle. There’s something about the redistribution of weight in a slept-in vehicle that throws the shape and scale of such vehicles ever-so-slightly but no less viscerally out of whack. You hustle and cover up in enough lots or moonlight as a mechanic and you’d know it with your eyes closed. Rawlings places is it as a three-month mobile domicile. This is only peculiar insofar as The Kingdom also has heavy anti-‘camping’ ordinance. It’s about the last place you’d want to crashpad if your engine’s still working. So: the Saab is mentally noted but not privileged in his upstairs file cabinet as he is convinced – whether intellectually or paranoically – The Kingdom’s branch of Them is sophisticated enough to have very subtle anti-anti-terrorist measures in place, i.e. dummy stage-cars to throw off D-town surveiling C.I.’s on stage-loon-electioneering jags in the Kingdom’s most densely frequented public space. It’d be too obvious if there were toiletries on the dash, a tangle of clothing in the back seat, and the hip sink of the fetal sleeper. Moreover, you’d be led to believe this was just another addressless border hopper with black market plates and vending licenses to match who’d chosen to ghost the tax grid instead of continue to be impoverished by it; another itinerant Hales supporter who jumped the border as the perceived heat (Inner or Outer) dictated. These were investigative small fry compared to the cold, non-tartared fish sandwich that laid in his investigative lap. Whether this was a roaming serf or some well-executed cover (departmentally aka “milieu transformation”) there could be no proof until he could lapel-shake driver and/or denizen until he squealed something sufficient to justify a fact check on one of the library’s public computers. (Cover dictated that a white-collar ex-con like Rawlings not be allowed sufficient opportunity to test the vulnerabilities of the county-hosted website, aka The Mint.) This distractability or over-curiosity leading to time-clock derelictions called in by the Branch Administrator to the fictional p.o. on belonging to Swafford.
“You tell that abundant a-…ahem…Convict-Citizen Pauling that is to phone the Hell in tonight or I’ll have his ass. Be sure to say that part: “…Have. Stop. His. Stop. Ass. Full stop.” Over and out.”