The Panel Is Lazy
A refrigeration tech in a Craig, Alaska gymnasium stands in a cardboard voting hood with a cheap ballpoint and a ballot that lists two Dan Sullivans, one of them labeled Incumbent and the other one labeled almost nothing. She has read labels her whole working life and has never seen a panel this lazy. Her mother spent thirty-one years printing these things and would have had something dry to say about it.
She pulls off Main onto the gravel and the truck rocks once, tires popping over the frost heave at the lot's lip. The berm of plow gravel is still dirty with last week's snow, half melted and refrozen into a gray crust. She parks nose-in against it, between a state truck and a Silverado with a sled deck, and sits for a second with the wipers off and the rain making its noise on the roof. The wax apple sits on its square of tar paper at the base of the windshield, pinked out by the sun. She takes the key out of the ignition and the pentagonal knot of twine swings and settles against the column. She puts her hand on the door and the handle is cold enough to feel wet through the glove.
She steps down into the puddle and it goes over the top of her boot. Fucking November. She walks the blue tape line from the curb to the door because it's there, because some clerk laid it down like a rule, and she steps over the sandwich board that's rocking in the wind with its arrow pointing the wrong way. The door is propped with a rubber wedge and the closer hisses at her as she goes through it.
Inside it's a basketball court with a government in the middle of it. Wax and wet wool and the furnace burning dust. A woman at the first folding table looks up over her readers and says good morning in the voice people use for grandchildren and dogs. She's eighty, maybe more, with a cardigan the color of salmon roe and a name tag in a plastic sleeve that says MARGE in marker. Behind her another one, thinner, with her hair pinned up and a fleece vest over a blouse, and a third one sitting in the office chair with the arms worn through, holding a binder open flat like a hymnal. They all three turn.
“You're the refrigeration girl,” the one in the vest says. “Harold's girl.”
“That's me.”
“Your dad bought a freezer off my brother in ninety-eight and it never quit. Never once.”
“It was a good freezer.”
“It was. He was a good man.”
Marge holds out her hand for the ID and she gives it and Marge reads the birth date off it like she's checking a tide table. The third one writes something in the binder with a highlighter and asks her to say her name and her address out loud, which she does, flat, and the third one says thank you dear. Marge peels a sticker off the sheet and presses it to her jacket without asking, right over the left breast pocket where the pen usually goes. The sticker is warm from the sheet. It smells like the sheet.
“Ballot's in the sleeve, honey. Pen's in the can. You can take the pen with you, we got plenty.” Marge's hands are ropy and clean and there's a bruise on the back of one that's gone yellow at the edge. “You know how the ranking works?”
“I know how it works.”
“All right, all right. Just some folks don't.” Marge pats the table twice and the sound is lost in the ballast hum.
The floor is varnished and scuffed white in lanes. She walks the lane. Her boots squeak and leave wet prints and she can feel the cold coming off the door behind her at ankle height, moving across the floor like water looking for a drain. The booth is a folding table with a cardboard hood on it. She stands because sitting in a gymnasium in wet pants is a decision she's not making today. She pulls the pen out of the can. It's a cheap ballpoint with a crack in the barrel and the ink comes out thin.
The ballot is longer than she expected. State questions in a column, a bunch of them, bond measures and a fish habitat thing and something about the permanent fund she reads twice and still doesn't trust. Then the Senate race. She reads it once. She reads it again and moves her thumb down the page like she's checking a schematic for a short. Two Dan Sullivans. One of them has “(Registered Republican) Incumbent” in the line beside the name. The other one has “Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.” and nothing else, no party, no address, no nothing, just a man's whole name sitting there in the same typeface as the other man's whole name. Like a set of identical breakers in a panel with one label missing. She has been looking at labels her entire working life and she has never seen a panel this lazy.
“Never seen anything like that,” she says out loud, to the cardboard hood. Her voice comes back at her flat and small.
She reads the rest of the column. Two more names under the Sullivans and she doesn't know either of them, one of them she's fairly sure ran last time and lost by a number that made the paper. She thinks about her mother in the municipal clerk's office for thirty-one years, printing sample ballots and folding them and stuffing them and bringing home the leftover stickers in a Christmas tin. Her mother would have had opinions about this ballot. Her mother would have said something dry and final about it and then changed the subject to the ferry schedule.
The pen is in her hand and the pen is not moving. Her thumb is on the ink. The wet from her boots has made a small dark circle on the varnish and she can see the reflection of the far light bank in it, flickering. She's got no reason to be standing here this long. She's got a ballot in front of her and a shop full of work and a weather window opening Thursday. But the ballot looks like a man in a cheap suit who's just told her a lie about a part number. It looks like the whole thing is a joke and everyone's in on it but the ladies at the table and her.
She digs in her jacket pocket and there's a Kennedy half dollar in there she got in change at the Klawock store three weeks ago and forgot about. Silver, worn smooth at the jaw. She holds it up under the cardboard hood where the light is. Heads, she thinks. Heads is the one with the label. Tails is the other one. It's not a system, it's a coin. A coin is at least honest about being a coin.
She flips it. It rings off her thumbnail and turns over twice in the air and she catches it and slaps it down on the back of her left hand. She lifts her hand. She looks at what she's got.
