If Men Were Angels

by Reed Karaim

  “All right,” he said.

  Benitez hitched his glove, kicked his leg, turned and lobbed a pitch like a spill of milk over the middle of the plate. Crane swung early off his front foot and fouled the pitch weakly to the left. He smiled, but when he saw the cameras recording everything, his expression went dead.

  “Go ahead, give me a pitch,” he said. “You don’t have to make it softball.”

  The cameras whirred. Myra crossed her fingers.

  “I can see the lead already,” she whispered. “Thomas Crane struck out in Florida Saturday. Please please please.”

  Benitez hitched his glove, kicked, spun and came over the top with a gentle, batting practice fastball. He threw just hard enough that the pitch looked like a real pitch, but wasn’t.

  The ball sailed across the plate and Crane swung in rhythm this time, the barrel of the bat coming out to meet the ball with the weight of his hips behind it. He was a bit stiff-legged but his head was tucked nicely and his shoulder was closed and moving forward when the bat came around in its arc and sent the ball rocketing in a starched rope toward left field. It hung on a line for what seemed like a long time, then dipped, hit the soft grass once and thumped off the wall beside a Marlboro ad.

  On the mound Benitez grabbed his heart and pretended to faint. Beside the cage Frank Thomas tipped his hat up as if to get a better look. “Nice rap,” he said.

  “There’s your TV clip,” I said.

  “Christ,” Myra said. “The Natural. I can’t stand it.”

  It could be nothing, I thought. Trips home to see an old friend, a check that got lost in the mail, an old staff member who can’t forgive someone for seeing clearly what he was. It could all be nothing.

  XI.

  RED, WHITE and blue bunting was already sagging in the heat when I arrived at the party on the night of Super Tuesday. Crane posters were spaced along the walls, and he stared at me from a dozen different angles with glassy-eyed optimism. Myra leaned against the wall, dodging elbows, clutching her notebook to her chest.

  “This is worse than New Hampshire,” she said. “Why is the room never big enough? I know, I know, so the crowd always looks big. But, come on, give us some air.”

  “Crane might be saying the same thing by the end of the night.”

  She jotted some stray thought in her notebook, tucked up in front of her nose.

  “He’s running for president,” she said. “It’s not supposed to be easy.”

  We had arrived in Lexington a few hours earlier, stopping first at the university. Raindrops pelted from tumescent clouds and Crane hurried indoors with his hands deep in his pockets. We had been campaigning nonstop for two days and you could see exhaustion in the way he fell forward into each stride, turning fatigue into an illusion of momentum. There hadn’t been quite enough money, organization or time and now they were voting across the South.

  In the hotel ballroom a young woman with wide blue eyes and a brown ponytail sipped from a paper cup and tried to keep her eyes on the earnest young man next to her with a similar ponytail, but her eyes strayed to the television cameras going up next to the stage and then to the willowy actress who wandered in our midst, untouchable in the soap bubble of celebrity. The crowd pressed and jostled her and her eyes danced with delight and her ponytail switched happily across her neck.

  The actress slid by and Myra, sensing her presence by the awed hush, glanced up and watched her pass.

  “She once bought a whole southern town, didn’t she? I wonder if she owns any of these people.”

  “I think that was in Georgia.”

  “I don’t know. Watch for ankle chains.”

  The big-screen televisions, squatting like Easter Island totems in the corners of the room, squawked to life. Myra teetered on her toes and peered over a shoulder. I read the early, inconsequential vote tallies scrolling down the screens to her, and she settled back on her heels with a sigh and halfheartedly jotted down numbers. The room came back to life with heightened, electric chatter.

  “This is going to turn into one hell of a wake if he goes down,” Myra said.

  Four men wearing the black satin jackets of the coal miners union shouldered past, their cologne settling on us like marsh gas. Their eyes rolled sideways, considered the brightly colored planets and stars decorating Myra’s jacket, rested briefly on her smiling man-in-the-moon earrings, then flew forward.

  “But there’s always the fun we can have in the meantime,” she said.

  An hour later I was finishing the first draft of my story when CNN called Missouri for Crane and the crowd roared as if watching the opening kickoff of a football game. In the press room, demarcated from the party only by a half-open folding wall, Nathan’s eyes twinkled with intimations of disaster.

  “If all Crane wins is Missouri and here, it’s trouble.”

  Everything came down to a measurement against expectations. It didn’t matter that two months ago Crane was at 7 percent, that he didn’t have real organizations in half the states voting tonight. Win only where he was expected to win and he’d done nothing. Governor Harris Wilson stepped inside the magic lantern and his shadow was tossed larger than life against our cave walls.

  “He’s still got a chance in Tennessee,” Nathan said. “But I don’t know if that’ll do it.”

  No, I thought, Tennessee wouldn’t quite do it. The feeling of heaviness that settled over me was like waking from a dream of flight.

  “He’s running for president,” I said. “It’s not supposed to be easy.”

  When CNN called Kentucky for Crane, I was in the ballroom interviewing an old woman with campaign buttons blanketing the front of her moss-green vest. She was telling me how collecting them had been her hobby since the Kennedy administration, when she froze in midsentence. Behind her the young woman with the ponytail stared at one of the televisions. A hand flew up to her mouth and she gasped, bending from the waist as if breathless. I could see her mouth the words behind the fluttering hand. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. I wondered how many hours she had worked for this moment, how many doors she had knocked on, how many phone calls she had made.

  It was time for Crane to appear and claim the victories he had in hand. The crowd shifted expectantly toward the stage. Half an hour later they were still waiting. In the press room we tinkered with our stories and watched the minutes tick away. We needed a quote. We needed Crane.

  Stuart Abercrombie stroked the pale parchment of his chin. “Something’s up,” he said. “The North Carolina gap’s down to a point. And too many precincts are still out.”

  “Where?”

  “Chapel Hill and Durham. My desk says they temporarily ran out of ballots.”

  The table we were working at was an eddy of silence.

  “Jesus Christ,” Nathan said. “College kids.”

  “Are they allowed to vote?” Myra said. “No wonder this country’s such a mess.”

  “Shit,” Nathan said. “He could win North Carolina.”

  “No.”

  “Hell, yes. You know how he did with college kids in Colorado and Maryland.”

  “That’s why he hasn’t shown up,” Abercrombie said. “They’re waiting up there.” He pointed toward Crane’s suite somewhere above us in the hotel. “They know something’s happening.”

  Nathan hopped on his chair like an admiral taking the bridge in a high sea and dialed his office. “The polling data is being revised . . . They’re rolling the new numbers now . . . Jesus Christ. No, really? Hell, here we go. All right, let me get this down.”

  He cradled the phone in his neck and scribbled. “Yeah . . . yeah . . . got it. All right. Twenty minutes, I know.” He glanced at us. “He’s got Tennessee, and the new numbers show him winning North Carolina by one and a half. The next raw vote total will move him ahead. It’s coming out of the college precincts. I’ve got the numbers.”

  A roar built next door, a long hoarse exultation. I looked up to see faces turned toward televisions like flowers
facing the sun, filling with light as the world spun on a pointed toe and swooned at Crane’s feet.

  Then he was making his way forward through the crowd. The roar climbed a notch. His hand rose in a triumphant fist. They pulled at his arms, they reached for him so the room swayed at his every step. He slid through the chaos, Angela by his side, disappearing and reappearing until he reached the stage, hugging local party leaders as he worked his way to the microphone. We tumbled out of the press room and pushed ourselves into the back of the crowd, standing on chairs, sliding around tables, holding tape recorders and cameras above our heads.

  Crane raised his hands for quiet.

  “I’d like to—”

  A crack split the air behind us. Crane was looking at the podium and he seemed to take a very long time to lift his head. His eyes filled with a strangely serene curiosity, as if he heard someone knocking on a door. His wife grabbed his arm. There was a flash of light and then a lingering echo.

  He straightened himself and smiled. Heads spun around, locating the noise. An ice sculpture at the buffet had shattered in the heat, an air bubble perhaps. We faced nothing more severe than the death of an ice swan.

  “Jesus,” Nathan said. When the statue cracked he had jumped and knocked over a bottle. Seltzer water was fizzing all over the crotch of his pants.

  “I know you’re excited about this man,” Abercrombie said, “but please.”

  Crane leaned into the microphone.

  “As I have been saying . . . We’ve got nothing to be afraid of—”

  He was drowned out. They tossed confetti, paper cups, napkins, anything they had into the air. Rolls of crepe paper bounced above the crowd, tossed back and forth until the room seemed to float beneath a slowly collapsing sky of red, white and blue. Crane stood at the microphone with both hands up, his sleeves sliding back on his jacket, his dark hair tangled in a nimbus of confetti. He tried to wave them to silence but the noise rolled on and on, and we all knew we were on our way to the convention in New York and the race against the president. Thomas Crane had gone south and won four states, twice as many as the polls had predicted. The media had set a standard and he had performed the best possible trick, exceeding it right on deadline.

  I stood unsteadily on a chair, trying to see into the knot of staff gathered to the right of the stage. Robin was wearing a gold sweater and her hair was damp across her forehead. She held her hands above her head, clapping with the crowd, and you could see her laughing, her eyes sweeping the room, swallowing it all in, letting it get inside her, fill her up, radiate back out in unalloyed joy.

  As Crane finished speaking my editor and I were shouting at each other over the phone.

  “What?”

  “Fifteen minutes. Just a new top.”

  “I know. I’m recasting it. I’m going to use the—”

  “What?”

  A man with a handlebar mustache staggered into the press room, swinging a beer bottle like a baton. He climbed on a chair, raised his arms and toppled backward, boot heels flipping into the air like a pair of startled cartoon eyes.

  “I’m recasting it. I’m going to use the ‘common fears, common hopes’ quote—”

  “Good. Fifteen minutes. We’ll fill in here.”

  “All right. You’ve got the Brill stuff out of Virgin—”

  “What? I’m having a hard time—”

  “The Brill stuff—”

  “The Bill stuff? Who’s Bill?”

  “Brill. Congressman Brill!”

  “We’re fine. That’s fine. Everything but the top.”

  “All right.”

  I worked with the controlled panic and attention to detail of someone launching a lifeboat with water lapping over his shoes. In fifteen minutes I was watching my computer, thinking send send send. I called and made sure the story was there, stood and stretched my back, fought my way past reporters hunched in mental carapaces over their laptops, sweat in sagging crescent moons beneath their arms, eyes glazed, lips murmuring odd scraps of story. I tiptoed through the tangle of phone and power cords, trying not to hit anyone’s elbow, until I found a warm can of Coke by an empty cooler. I carried it to my computer and went back to work.

  In the ballroom the television crews were doing interviews and their portable spots swung back and forth, illuminating bodies in elongated cones of light. Voices rose and fell in fervent swoops, one shrill laugh floating above them all in a mad, fluted solo. A country-western band led off with a raucous electric fiddle, and the actress-who-did-or-did-not-own-a-town danced a jig with a coal miner, the girl with the ponytail waltzed across the floor with a torn poster of Crane clutched to her chest; a senator from Alabama slapped John Starke on the shoulders. Someone passed out party hats and soon they all looked as if they’d escaped from some eternal New Year’s Eve roaring on in hell.

  I worked hard for another hour and a half, sending three more updates of the story, the last for our West Coast papers. On other primary nights my job had been relatively simple. The main stories had been written by one of the bureau’s veteran political analysts, reporters who did not follow any one candidate but roamed the countryside, thinking deep thoughts and going wherever their wisdom took them. My role had been to feed them information and fashion a small sidebar about the Crane campaign. The phenomenon is known as getting “big-footed,” stepped on by a reporter with more clout. I may have lucked into the candidate rising like a bottle rocket, but I was still on my first campaign and wasn’t to be trusted with the final word. It hadn’t mattered that much to me; I had been too happy to be on the road.

  But tonight the big feet had guessed wrong and were sitting in Wilson’s campaign headquarters in Florida. I was writing the main story and they were feeding me. I wasn’t leaving my computer until every possible update had winged its electronic way to the farthest corners of the tidy little empire that was Cannon Newspapers, Incorporated.

  By the time I was done, the party had drained out of the ballroom. A couple sat holding hands and whispering in one corner; a drunk slumped over another table, humming to himself. The room smelled of stale beer. Half-empty glasses left damp half-moons on the tablecloths, and sodden crepe paper hung everywhere like shed snakeskin.

  The phone was ringing when I entered my room. Latrelle Gregory’s lugubrious voice greeted mine.

  “Clifford, I was beginning to think you’d joined the all-night bacchanal.”

  It was after midnight and I had been working for hours. My thoughts felt like they were plodding through mud.

  “How’d you get this number?” I asked.

  “Your office, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “There is something else, Clifford. Something I remembered after we spoke. There was another sudden trip to Berthold—or at least back to Illinois. I checked my old office datebook today to be sure. I keep them all, you know. During his first year in the Senate. June fifteenth to be exact . . . Yes . . . He was scheduled to attend a hearing of the labor and human services appropriations subcommittee. It was important because of Medicare reforms. We had a long list of questions prepared. Then at five o’clock the evening before he tells us he won’t be attending. He asked Julia to get him a ticket to Springfield for early the next morning. Listen. I have jotted down here: ‘Congressman clearly upset.’ He came back late the next night. . .”

  His voice trailed off and I heard him breathing a little too hard. I thought Gregory had celebrated Crane’s southern triumph with a toast or two.

  “And he never offered an explanation?”

  “No. I don’t have this in my notes, but I remember that he wasn’t much good for a couple of weeks after. Spent a lot of time away from the office. With Angela, I believe. Whatever else one says about the man, he always put his shoulder to the grindstone. So that lodged in my mind.”

  “Well . . .”

  “There’s one other little bit. I can’t be sure. But I remember checking his desk for something else when he was gone. He’s a tidy
guy, you know, but I remember he had scrawled a name down on his blotter. Joe, I believe.”

  “Joe?”

  “I seem to remember so.”

  “No last name?”

  “No.”

  “And you don’t know who it might be?”

  “No, I’m afraid I really couldn’t say.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Yes, well. I thought you would find it interesting. So how is the celebration?”

  “I don’t know. I just finished working.”

  “Clifford, Clifford. I am many hundred miles away and yet I can tell you that in some crowded room at this moment are young women flush with the passion of the moment. It bubbles inside them like champagne, Clifford. They have never felt so good and they want to share it. You have sympathetic eyes, my boy. Tonight is the night to put them to good use.”

  “Thank you, Gregory. I’ll act on that immediately.”

  I put the phone down and looked in the mirror. Sympathetic eyes. Eyes begging for sympathy, maybe. There was a party in the room next door. The wall thumped and I heard shrill notes of laughter above the din. I wondered where Robin was. Any one of a hundred places. The phone rang again.

  My editor’s voice was dry, exhausted. “I tried to call earlier, but your line was busy. Who the hell were you talking to at this time of night?”

  “No one. An old friend.”

  “I’m on my way out the door. I just wanted to tell you, you did a great job tonight. They’re jealous as hell right now down in Florida.”

  “Great.”

  Something in my voice stopped her.

  “Is there anything else?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Not now.”

  When she was done I pulled off my tie and walked to the window. I didn’t have anything yet, not enough to let the bureau know. Tell them now and they’d be all over me for a story, and I didn’t know it was a story, not yet. I had been lied to, though. I had to remember that. I had been lied to. Or was it a mistake, one anyone could make? So many years ago. Two different visits confused.