All-American Werewolf

Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE

Peter Brunnen loved watching the deliberations in the House Chamber from the galleries above. Though others might think them unbearably dry and boring, he found the processes that ran the American government to be fascinating. Every little procedure, every tradition, every symbol of American democracy built into the Chamber itself was exciting for Peter.

He glanced around the galleries. Built to accommodate hundreds, there was a mere handful of people watching that day, most of whom were Congressional staffers like himself. Stretching his long legs out to have more space and rubbing his smooth, cleft chin, he could never understand how the galleries weren’t packed every day with people watching their government do its work.

Peter returned his attention to the speaker, a congresswoman from California: “… was arrested and subjected to a secret, hooded military tribunal in which she was denied due process, according to the State Department, human rights groups and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights…” Today the House was considering, among other things, what actions to take to secure the freedom of an American convicted of terrorism held prisoner in Peru. Peter found it amazing that the government of the most powerful nation on earth would take time to even discuss helping a citizen convicted of a crime in another country. He ran his hand through the mop of unruly, sand-colored lazy curls atop his head as he considered the marvel of it.

How could people not be riveted by this? he thought. How could they just not care? I’ll never understand people.

As the proceedings went on, Peter looked around the Chamber, thinking about the meanings of the symbols in it. There were, of course, stars and cornucopia and bas relief busts, but his favorite was always the illuminated skylight above. A bald eagle, wings outstretched, seemed ever to float serenely above the Chamber as if watching the decisions made there and judging their worth. But to Peter, the eagle always seemed more than just a passive observer and judge – as Peter believed were too many of the American electorate – but more of a protector, as if it soared above the deliberations with its wings spread wide to shield those in the Chamber from evil influences.

He brought his attention back to the congresswoman for a bit as she continued. “… She has been held under horrendous prison conditions in the Peruvian Andes and we are all very concerned with her failing health. Lori has been subjected to long periods of isolation which have been cited by Amnesty International as cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, in violation of…”

His eyes lifted from the lectern where the congresswoman spoke to the two great fasces flanking the large flag behind the Speaker’s podium. Peter had always been a fan of that Roman symbol and the meaning behind it. He appreciated how it meant an individual thin rod could easily be shattered, yet when bundled together, a group of such rods is both flexible and strong, strong enough to weather many blows.

It’d been pointed out before to Peter that he was an idealist, but he truly believed if enough people were to act in concert to create change, then change could happen, regardless of how poor or disconnected or otherwise powerless they might be as individuals. He believed it was only a matter of the willingness to fight and to stand together against what people thought was wrong.

That was the entire reason he’d taken a job on Congressman Sim Thompson’s staff after graduating college the previous year. Peter had been born and raised in a little Maryland town called Mountain Lake Park, and he’d spent the last several years watching as all the businesses seemed to slowly evaporate. Never much of a thriving metropolis to begin with, Mountain Lake Park had turned into a husk of its former self and was now just a scattered collection of houses. It was the same in the nearby town of Oakland just as it seemed to be all throughout Garrett County.

And he believed the reason was entirely because of terrible decisions made in Washington, decisions that favored the powerful at the expense of everyone else, ones designed to line the pockets of those who needed it the least by taking it from those who had the least. So, idealistic or not, Peter came to Washington to help change things.

The congresswoman finally finished her remarks as Peter again attended to her words, “… has given the President the authority, short of war, to gain the release of a U.S. citizen who has been wrongly incarcerated abroad, then we must do all that we can do to bring Lori home.”

“Hey,” Peter heard a hushed voice say next to him. He could smell her distinctive lilac odor just before she spoke as a lightness settled on his heart and a thrilling tingle went down his spine. “I thought I might find you here.”

He turned and smiled broadly at Angie Fontaine, a fellow staffer working for a congressman from Alabama.

“Hey, babe,” Peter said, kissing her quickly as she sat next to him. “How is your day going?”

“Pretty well, thanks,” Angie said in a southern accent he thought would sound musical, even if she were reciting tax code. “It’s been a fairly straightforward day. How about you, honey?”

Peter paused a moment before answering, realizing he was again getting lost in Angie’s brilliant green eyes, the way her long, brown hair framed her lovely face, and the way little dimples formed every time she smiled. He’d been doing that a great deal lately, noticing with excited amusement that he’d spent much of the past several months staring into her eyes, especially at their dinner dates. Pete would listen to Angie’s lilting voice as she talked about politics, getting lost in the depths of her eyes, finding it adorable the way she kept pushing her glasses up her little nose.

Peter had been driven by idealistic goals to come work in Washington, preparing for a future in Congress himself; he had also, unexpectedly, fallen in love.

Peter still found it amazing that this smart and ambitious woman, who was also lusciously curvaceous, had somehow found a tall, lanky policy nerd was a catch worth dating. Peter loved her sharp mind and her sense of humor, the way she’d put a pen to her lips when thinking, and even her habit of bouncing a leg when she was nervous. Though an unbiased observer might note that Angie was perhaps a bit too plump or that she had an overbite, Peter noticed none of that. To his eyes, Angie was perfection and beauty personified.

“It’s been pretty busy, actually,” Peter said, noting that it was now Angie who seemed to be lost in his hazel eyes. “We had a meeting earlier today, Thompson’s voting on the Bilbray amendment now, another meeting in a little while, and then maybe some committee stuff. I’ll eat, I guess, at some point. It’s not easy juggling a full-time Congressional schedule with an election.”

“No, I guess not,” Angie said, gently stroking his hand as she spoke. “Okay, so… who’s your favorite poet?” This was something the pair had been doing since they started dating. They’d been together now for several months but hadn’t known each other the previous twenty-five years of their lives. They were trying to find out these little details and so would randomly ask such questions.

“My favorite poet?” Peter asked. He liked reading but wasn’t much of a poetry guy. “Umm… Poe, I guess.”

“Poe?” Angie asked incredulously.

“Yes, Poe,” he said. “C’mon, ‘Nevermore, quoth the Raven,’ and all that. That’s classic stuff.”

“Actually, it’s ‘Quoth the Raven, Nevermore,’ but whatever.”

Peter looked at Angie and waggled his finger at her, yet she continued smiling a toothy grin at him, nonetheless. “Listen, Little Miss Smarty Pants…”

“Uh-huh.” Peter’s threats were unimpressive.

“Okay, fine… what’s your worst personality trait?”

“Hmm…” Angie said, putting a finger to her cleft chin. “I guess it’s that I can get so lost in a good book, I don’t hear if people are talking to me and forget what I need to do. I can’t tell you how many times mamma had to come get me from my room because I didn’t hear her yelling my name for dinner.”

“Ooh, damn,” Peter said. “You don’t want mamma mad at you.”

Angie chuckled. “Definitely not my mamma. What about you? Your worst trait?”

“That’s hard to answer since I’m so awesome, but—”

“I can provide some suggestions, if that’d help,” Angie said smiling.

Peter looked at Angie with mouth wide open, hand on heart, as if crushed. “Hmpf. Fine, now I guess I know where you stand… I suppose it’s that I’m too stubborn. When I get something in my mind, I’m like a bulldog with a bone. I just can’t let go.”

“Sometimes that can be a good thing,” said Angie.

“Yeah, sometimes it can be, but I can also drive people crazy with it. Okay, favorite genre of writing?”

Angie giggled as she covered her face, then said, “Horror.”

“Horror?!” Peter asked. A few of the other gallery attendants turned to look at the sudden outburst as the couple shrunk into their seats, again speaking softly.

“I know, I know, it doesn’t go with poetry so much but, you know—”

“You kidding me? I love horror. Want to guess whose work first got me into it?”

“If you say Poe then that’s another thing we have in common,” Angie said, the pair clutching hands in their whispered excitement for the genre. “I read The Tell-Tale Heart in middle school and got addicted to horror right away.”

“Me too!” said Peter. “Man, the dead vulture eye of the old guy always gave me the creeps. Do you like – s**t, wait, what time is it?” he asked, now looking at this watch. “s**t. I need to get going.”

“Okay. Dinner tonight, my place?” Angie asked with a smile that flashed her dimples and brightened her already lovely face.

“Yeah, absolutely. Hey, that Blair Witch Project movie comes out next Friday. You want to go see it?”

Angie scrunched up her face, then said, “Well, I like horror books a lot more than I do horror movies, but we can give it a try. Wait – what’s your favorite horror movie?”

Peter chuckled a little, then said, “It’s definitely Fright Night. A little campy, I know, but I just love that movie. Okay, babe, I gotta go!”

Peter gave Angie another kiss then headed out. He grabbed a quick lunch and returned to Thompson’s office as the team was assembling for their afternoon meeting, then took a seat at the large conference table near his friend, Rick Johnson.

“Hey, Rick,” Peter said. “How’s it going?”

Rick shook his head and rolled his eyes, then said, “I’m just about going crazy keeping up with all these media requests. I mean, it’s good that the boss is getting national attention now, but damn it! My head is spinning.”

“I hear you, man,” Peter said as he nodded solemnly. “I think we’re all just about crazy at this point. All I know is I’m really looking forward to the recess. At least it’ll get us out of here.”

“Mmhmm… hey, how are things going with Angie?”

Peter smiled reflexively at the mention of her name. “It’s going good, man. It’s going real good. I think she’s the one for me.”

“That’s awesome, Peter. I’m happy for you.” Rick patted his friend on the shoulder and smiled as Thompson rapped his knuckles on his desk to get the meeting started.

Thompson, as he always did during these staff meetings, sat at his desk, suit jacket off, tie loosened and collar open, sleeves rolled up, leaning back in his chair with his hands cradling his head. His chief of staff, legislative director, and press secretary sat in the chairs in front of his desk while the remaining staff sat at the conference table off to the side.

“Alright, Jimmy,” Thompson said to his chief of staff after he’d gotten everyone’s attention, “take it away. What do we got?”

“Well, to begin with,” Jimmy said, “we’ve made some of the language in the speech you’re going to give on the floor about keeping manufacturing in-country crisper and more succinct, but we do need to discuss some of the verbiage…”

Peter tried desperately to follow the thread of the discussion and take notes on what was assigned to him, but ever since he started dating Angie, his mind wandered away in meetings with surprising ease. Try as he might to pay attention, somehow his thoughts seemed to quickly drift back to her. As the team discussed prioritizing legislative initiatives for the upcoming fall – and as he pretended to be attentively taking notes – Peter found himself thinking about how good Angie always smelled of flowers when he hugged her. As the meeting changed focus to what Thompson could expect during his appearance on Face the Nation that Sunday, Peter seemed almost stuck on how smooth her skin was when he’d rub her arms – Angie could somehow feel chilly in an oven, apparently! – or how soft her lips were when they kissed. As the team started to debate the best tactics to leverage advantage against Garrou, Peter found himself wondering how edible she might look nude – a delight he had yet to experience.

Nearly an hour later, Peter was jolted back to the meeting when Jimmy, the chief of staff, and Drew, the legislative director, began to loudly disagree on some important point. As they did, Lana, the press secretary, aligned herself with Jimmy and the disagreement looked like it was about to become a two-on-one fight.

“All right, all right, all right!” Thompson yelled even louder, taking control of the meeting back. “That’s enough. Killing each other isn’t going to help us win an election against big bad Lou Garrou. That’s got to be our focus here, not whose idea might be better.”

Thompson stood and sighed heavily, running his hand through his salt-and-pepper hair as he walked out from behind the desk. The weight of his schedule was showing on him.

“You know, I never quite feel comfortable in this town,” he said. “Everyone’s too fake, everything’s too fake. I always feel we’re all on some damn Hollywood set and I can’t stand it. I don’t know about you guys, but it makes me cranky. Makes me antsy.” The nodding heads, Peter’s included, indicated Thompson was not alone in that. He sighed again heavily, then said, “We need to get out of here for a spell, go on something like a retreat. We got a lot to work on and we can’t do it here, not without killing each other.”

The staff members looked at one another, murmuring their assent, then Jimmy, as chief of staff, spoke on their behalf as usual. “Hey, sounds good. What do you have in mind, Sim?”

Thompson walked back to his desk to check the calendar. “Let’s see, today is the… twenty-first of July. Our summer recess begins August ninth. Let’s just table everything we can for the next two weeks. In that time, I want all of you coming up with as many ideas, proposals, new perspectives, whatever, as you can. From the eighth to the thirteenth, we’ll take a retreat at my hunting lodge up there in the mountains. It’ll be cooler than this damn place, it’s smack dab in the middle of a hundred acres of woods so no one will be around, nice and quiet. What do you say, folks?”

Everyone agreed this would be an excellent idea, and Peter was especially thrilled to be once again in the woods of Garrett County, where he’d spent most of his youth. Plus, he’d heard about the hunting lodge before, a great sprawling building made out of huge oak beams built at the turn of the century by Thompson’s grandfather and he was eager to spend a week in it, even if it was to work.

The team was suddenly rejuvenated and energized, ready to begin what they were certain was going to be a memorable retreat.