If Men Were Angels

by Reed Karaim

  “I don’t care. Let’s go. It’ll be wild in the dark. Don’t you want to see it?”

  Robin laughed. “We could stay for a couple of hours in one of those motels? The kind with a heart-shaped bed?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “We’d be back before anyone woke up in the morning?”

  “I promise.”

  She looked into the sun. Crane’s voice rose like a sail catching the wind. “. . . and they say we can’t do anything about the failure of our schools, the closing of our factories, the crime. They say the government can’t do anything about any of this. They lecture us about working harder, playing by the rules, behaving properly . . .” The words were as familiar to both of us as the rosary to a nun.

  “Oh God, tell me this is wise,” Robin said.

  “They have heart-shaped beds. What else could it be?”

  John Starke stood down the street with a bespectacled young man at his side who clutched a notebook and pen. Starke saw Robin and waved for her to join them. She nodded and then turned back to me, her eyes rising slowly and then filling with light.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think I can make it. But I’ll try to think of something else. I promise.”

  The rocking chairs were full so I sat on the porch railing, turning my tape recorder on for the last part of the speech. They were almost always the same, but you could never be sure. I leaned against the wall of the cottage and tried to see him through a swaying maple branch.

  The stage was dwarfed by a huge banner strung across the pediment overhead, Crane fluttering in majestic rhythm across the sky. Below it he seemed small. He stood behind the microphone stand, his weight on the heel of one ebony loafer, his index finger touching the air as though the point he was making was a physical thing, right there to be pinned down. “You’ve heard what I want to do,” he said. “Job training, healthcare reform, child welfare. But everything I have said today, everything I believe this nation can accomplish, none of it will get done if we continue to suspect each other’s motives and divide ourselves by race, by class, by sex, by religious beliefs . . .”

  He was reaching the end. I closed my eyes on the porch and the sun colored my eyelids a drowsy yellow, spectral trees rising in red and blue. Crane floated among them, an afterimage breaking into phosphorescent fish that swam away in a sea of words.

  “I have been accused of excessive optimism. I plead guilty. I have been accused of a naive belief that our differences are not as great as what unites us. I plead guilty.”

  I felt the crowd stir. A thousand lips began to form the words.

  “We have nothing to be afraid of from each other,” Crane said as they joined in ecstatic chorus. On the porch reporters mimicked the line half-heartedly, more out of habit than malice.

  I opened my eyes in time to see Crane toss off his patented wave and disappear off the back of the stage. Around me reporters stirred lazily into action. I pulled my cell phone out of my briefcase and called my editor.

  “I’ve got nothing to file.”

  “Kelly wants to talk to you,” Ellen said. There was a click and Kelly came on the line.

  “Listen, Cliff, I’ve gone through every database I could find looking for stuff about Bushmill and Crane. There’s a little bit about Bushmill in the business pages, but nothing much. I think he keeps away from the press. There’s nothing else . . .” I heard her take a quick breath. “So. I decided to call the local library down there in Phillips, where he lives. I asked them to send me their clips from the local paper—it’s a weekly—and Cliff, I’ve got a story. Listen to this. Crane attended a ribbon-cutting at an addition to Bushmill’s plant outside of Phillips. It’s when he was a freshman congressman . . . and . . . Here it is. Bushmill was asked about Crane and he tells the reporter. ‘I’ve been impressed by this young man since I first saw him hitchhiking to school. I’ve been glad to help him since the days he came back to Berthold after his mother died.’ At first I read right by that, and then I thought, why would he say something that specific? ‘The days he came back to Berthold after his mother died.’ Why did he mention that time? What did he do for him then? I went back and read your profile, but I couldn’t find anything . . . Do you know?”

  I stared at the crowd shuffling down the street. When Crane’s mother died he was hiking across Tuscany. He’d just finished his service in the army and it was a trip he’d promised himself for more than a year. He was staying outside of Florence in a farmhouse with a view of a three-hundred-year-old monastery on a hill. He checked with American Express and found the message waiting for him, and he was on the next morning’s flight out of Rome. A day later he stood beside her grave while they buried her on a cold October afternoon. The other children fled, but he stayed on, always the responsible one, sorting through his parents’ papers, trying to get his father into the veterans’ hospital in Springfield. For two months he stayed in the old house with the same ghost walking up the cellar steps at night, the same drafts sneaking through the windows, and then one day he was gone, fleeing back East to graduate school in Princeton. His cousin remembered it as one of the loneliest times in his life. I didn’t know how he had been helped by Bushmill. I thought about it and a young man hovered gray and indistinct, disappearing into the darkness on an autumn evening more than twenty years ago.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Do you want me to try to talk to Bushmill?”

  On the street people were standing on tiptoes, looking into the distance and breaking into smiles.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  Silence on the other end of the line.

  “I’ll see Gregory soon,” I said. “Let me talk to him first.”

  “You’re sure? Ellen thinks we’ve got to get going on this.”

  “I’m sure. We’ll move fast enough.”

  The limousine appeared as I hung up. The door opened and Angela Crane stepped out. The people along the street pressed toward her. She waited by the car while members of the staff unrolled an orange rope and then she walked alongside, briefly touching hands, stopping to listen, to take small gifts handed to her and pass them to an aide. She was wearing a sleeveless red dress with white polka dots and she seemed so small and delicate it was hard to remember she was an insurance lawyer. How do women do this, I wondered? How do they balance the disparate roles expected of them?

  Myra drifted out of the cottage and stood beside me, watching Angela work the edge of the crowd. A small child, a girl with a tangle of brown curls held back with a red ribbon, slid under the rope. Angela knelt and lifted her to her side, smiling down at her until their noses almost touched.

  “I always wonder why they never had children,” Myra said.

  Angela whispered conspiratorially into a tiny pink ear and handed the girl to her mother. She moved a little farther down the line to a place where the crowd had an oddly pleased look about itself. From my distance, the waiting faces had a hypnotizing similarity. An old man, a boy, a young woman, a llama.

  Angela drew her hand back as if stung. The llama eyed her apathetically from behind the rope, gray-brown, donkey-eared head peering out between a proud couple.

  “Bring it out,” the photographers said, and soon the llama was standing in all its shaggy glory in the middle of the street, while they clicked away madly and a chant began. “Kiss the llama! Kiss the llama!”

  The sun was high and the trees, cottages, and shops shimmered in its unencumbered light. Ten thousand people watched while the wife of the next president of the United States and a llama eyed each other.

  “Kiss the llama!” they shouted. “Kiss the llama!”

  Angela Crane leaned over and kissed the llama on the top of the nose.

  The cheer rippled back through the crowd until those raising their voices could have no idea what it was they were celebrating beyond the sky, the light, the lake, the day.

  Robin appeared by my shoulder. “Come on inside for a moment.”

  We
slipped inside and up the stairs without anyone paying attention. Robin led me to the second floor and a room at the front of the house, where the sound from below rose through an open window and mottled green light drifted along the floor.

  “No one is using this room,” Robin said, “and I have the key in my pocket.”

  She locked the door and placed her hand on my chest, unbuttoning the first button with a twist. Laughter rose outside in a muffled wash and she placed her mouth against my ear and whispered, “And we’re not going anywhere for an hour. And there is no news today.” Her hand slid lightly down and pulled the second button loose and we slid backward toward a couch beneath the window.

  My back slid along the matted hair of the old couch and I felt the warm air along my chest and down my stomach to my hips where it disappeared in a different warmth. Robin rose above me in the aquarium twilight. I saw her chin and the tangled corona of her hair and her shoulders, delicately concave under the bone, before the white swelling of her breasts and then her ribs and the shadow of her stomach, hollow and tight, and her hips rocking warmly against mine. She smiled and slid hard against me. She moved and the old couch groaned. In the corner of my eye I saw the leaves of an oak tree sliding back and forth against the screen and I turned my head, and the room was at sea and hot and crossed with thunder and she was pale and tall above me.

  And it is so strange that I remembered a winter night in Montana. We had been fighting earlier. She was always enraged then about some injustice or another and there was something inside me that always resisted judgment. We argued and later we went to bed. In the winter the wind blew from the North, and the skeleton hand of an oak tree scratched the window, and our bedroom was always cold. Robin’s clothes lay in a collapsed ghost in the corner. She rose above me in bed that night too, settling herself on me suddenly. Then she rocked forward, her eyes wide, her hair falling around us like a parachute, and she whispered hotly in my ear, “I’m right.”

  Splayed fingers pressed themselves into my shoulders and I opened my eyes to the sea-green light and her arched and lovely form and then there was only this joined part of myself rising and falling and the twin engines of our breath racing toward the familiar tunnel of darkness.

  While somewhere in the distance . . .voices floating up from the porch, a radio reporter piecing together his report, snippets of Crane’s speech running back and forth, cut into delicate slivered ribbons.

  “We have nothing to be afraid of . . . nothing to be afraid of . . . to be afraid of . . . from each other.”

  III.

  WE RETURNED to the air and the days passed in collage. Leaning against a brick wall to dodge the blistering sun in a Polish neighborhood outside of Cleveland where we ate sauerkraut pierogies on paper plates and watched dancers in heavily embroidered skirts melt while they performed. Tripping over ducks waddling through a Memphis hotel on their way to a fountain in the center of the antiquarian lobby. Shooting pool with Steven Duprey in a press room set up in a pool hall off the tumbleweed-dry square of a Texas town while the locals peered from the shadows beneath their hats. An Elvis impersonator dispensing wisdom from a pickup bed at a truck stop in West Virginia. A woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty following us for two days through Pennsylvania.

  Crane faced swelling crowds everywhere. Thirty thousand filled downtown St. Louis at noon on a Thursday. Twenty thousand waited in Detroit. Seven thousand lined the banks of the San Antonio River when he came around the bend, standing in the prow of a barge and wearing sunglasses like MacArthur. The most fervent crowds were in the small towns left behind in the age of airport-to-airport campaigning. They were rediscovered this summer, and when his staff realized how good they looked on television, we made a lot of one-day bus trips to visit these places where the old vision of America survives.

  On a clear night in Waco, Crane led a candlelight procession across a bridge in honor of a high school teacher slain the week before. We waited in a park on the riverbank while a field of fireflies moved in solemn procession through the air. Somewhere in the distance the methodical chant of protesters floated in and out of the hum of traffic. Something about Jesus. Something about God.

  The night was unseasonably cold and the crowd waited hushed and huddled as the march curved down the bridge and appeared before us. Crane’s gray trenchcoat was a cloak in the darkness; his candle cast his elongated face into a mask. The teachers and students behind him held melted candles aloft in ghostly, translucent fingers. There was a pinpricking moment of silence and then the pent-up roar of the crowd swallowed us. And I thought that there was something in the sound we didn’t understand, some deep-throated pitch of intensity, some desire that escaped those of us in the press.

  Our journey was refracted and distilled every night in the shadow universe of television. Those of us traveling with Crane glimpsed this more perfect reality in airports and hotel lounges or late at night in our rooms. It brought a realization that we traveled at the center of a web of electronic perception, what we saw and heard broken down into glittering facets and reassembled into a jeweled miniature. There was Thomas Crane on the news in front of another flag-draped background. There were his ads: Crane, sleeves rolled up, at a chalkboard in front of a rapt class of high school students, explaining what it would take to see that they had decent jobs waiting for them in the next decade; Crane discussing job retraining with unemployed workers standing in line to collect benefits in Youngstown; Crane blasting two clay pigeons out of the air before talking about how his position on gun control was being misrepresented. The news and the ads were all part of the miniature, reflected and gleaming without distinction. All of it, despite the dithering of the talk shows and the ponderous mulling of the Times and the Post, trading on a swelling implicit faith: that he could be trusted, that he was different than the others.

  The last night of the Republican convention, when the president accepted his party’s nomination for the second time, Crane and Angela and his senior staff watched in a hotel room in Houston. They listened as a small, white-haired man with the eyes of a falcon called on old allegiances, evoked primeval fears of the unknown. When the speech was over they watched the commentary and then Crane turned off the tube, and this is how Steven Duprey, fulfilling one part of his debt, remembered the evening:

  There was a reflective silence as the light on the screen shrunk to the null point, and a nervous shuffling until John Starke cleared his throat.

  “Well. That was the same old same old. You know what the voters are going to say to that? Fool me once, but not twice.”

  A chorus of assent trickled out as they waited for Crane. He stared at the dead screen, rubbing his jaw absently with his fingers. He turned to Angela, who leaned against his side, feet curled up on the couch.

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s close, but I still like the other guy better.”

  The aides laughed. Crane waited. She shook her chopped black hair uncertainly.

  “I don’t know. There’s something missing. Don’t ask me what. He said all the things he should say and he slammed his fist at the right times and he looked like the president but . . .”

  “Resentful,” Crane said. “He looked resentful that the public’s making him go through this again. He looked angry that he’s tied in the polls with some senator from nowhere, after all he’s done for the country. And it makes him look old. Proud but old.”

  Duprey leaned against the wall beside the television.

  “Old means tired,” he said. “No matter how many times you pound on the podium.”

  Blendin stumbled out of the bathroom, zipping up his fly, his dirty T-shirt caught in the zipper. He yanked until his khakis slid past his belly-button and he looked like a hundred-year-old man.

  “Goddamn this . . . I don’t know if old means tired, but I’ll fucking tell you this. Resentful means nasty. Like a cornered fucking animal . . . This fucking . . . And nasty means a campaign just like every other presidential campaign
for the past twenty years. You define or you get defined. You bite or you get bit . . . God-fucking-damn this thing!”

  He held the torn piece of T-shirt in his right hand and finished zipping up his pants.

  “Now can we get back to work?” he said calmly.

  Two hours later, when much of the staff had dispersed and all the polls had been reviewed, the money allocated, a half-dozen complaints, pleas and petitions from state campaign managers dispensed with or dismissed, Blendin handed a sheaf of papers across the table to Crane, who read silently, passed them on to Angela, and slid back in his chair and closed his eyes, as if suddenly tired.

  “Rough,” Angela said. “Can we back this up? The one about the administration’s relationship with Mekron Chemical?”

  Duprey ran his finger down a sheet of paper. “Fifty-seven thousand dollars in campaign contributions from various corporate executives and three visits with senior administration staff on the deregulation bill.”

  Angela blinked. “And they’re the company being sued in the Wyoming pesticide case?”

  Blendin sipped from a Budweiser that had been sitting at his elbow for an hour.

  “That’s right. In the water and fucking tumors the size of grapefruit.”

  Crane spoke with his eyes closed. “The administration held two business roundtables on the pesticide deregulation bill, and they met with half a dozen companies each time. Is that where they met with Mekron?”

  “Research gave me the dates,” Duprey said. “I don’t know who else was there.”

  “Does it really matter, Senator?” Blendin asked.

  Crane looked across the table at Blendin until the consultant averted his eyes, glancing at Starke asleep on the couch.

  “I know how this has worked so far,” Blendin said quietly. “I hear them in the back of the plane. Saint Thomas. They might not like it, but I know how valuable it’s been. But this is a different game. No more intramurals. You’re facing the Oakland Raiders now. They bite, they spit, they’ve got bad breath, they tell stories about your momma.”