"Well," Bobby Jack drawled casually, "Jews are always complaining about something. Why don't we forget that shit? I ever tell you the joke about the two niggers at the United Nations?"

He waited for an answer. That joke never failed. In the campaign, it had always been good for a chuckle from the newspapermen and they never wrote stories about it either. These reporters didn't seem to want to hear it. Billings tossed his empty beer can out toward the

8

unpaved street. His bladder hurt. He should have gone to the bathroom again.

A neighbor passed and waved at him.

"Hiya, Bobby Jack."

" 'Lo, Luke. How's it hanging?"

"Straight, Bobby Jack."

"Keep it that way, Luke."

He smiled as the other man walked away. He realized though that his bladder was so full that even smiling hurt.

"Wait here a minute," he told the reporters.

A Secret Service man turned to walk with him.

"You stay here," Bobby Jack said. "Nobody goes with me when I pee."

Rather than go all the way inside, he walked alongside his house. He urinated against the wall of the building. He was zipping up his fly as he walked back to the reporters. The thin brunette looked as if she had just swallowed a lemon, peel and all.

Her tough luck, thought Bobby Jack. Did she think that men didn't have to pee once in a while? Maybe the men she went out with didn't.

He took the can of beer from his back pocket and snapped it open. The bouncing it had undergone caused the beer to spray up in the air. Quickly, he put his thumb over the hole and aimed the spray at the reporters. He caught the big-chested woman with a frothy spray that landed atop her curly sprayed hairdo, where it settled like droplets of dew on a spider web.