If Men Were Angels

by Reed Karaim

  “What happens when all this is over?” I asked.

  Robin’s eyes lost their focus and she lifted a hand up to block the sun, as if the future was floating out there somewhere in the back of a wheat field in Iowa.

  “What do you think you’ll do after the campaign? Are they going to ask you to cover the White House?”

  “They might.”

  “The big job, Cliff. A thousand years ago I thought you were headed somewhere and now it turns out you were.”

  The girl on stage was singing each note in a voice without hesitation or doubt. The crowd stood transfixed, as if watching someone on a high wire.

  “I hate the White House press corps,” Robin said. “I hate the whole fucking attitude. The shallow cynicism. The way they whine. When one of them turns up on the plane, it’s like having somebody from the court of Louis the Fourteenth on board.”

  “I promise not to whine.”

  “I’ll be there too. On the other side.”

  “Just like now.”

  “No. It’ll be different. You know that. This”—she waved a hand to take in the stage, the crowd, the press tent.—“this is summer camp. The White House will be different. Different sides day after day. Different choices.”

  “I’m not on any side. I’m on your side.”

  Robin smiled sadly. “Cliff, you are the infinite and eternal bystander. You’re God’s man on the sidelines.”

  “That is such bullshit. Give me a chance.”

  She stood there pale in the sunlight, and I wanted to grab her and shake her until she understood.

  “They’re calling for you,” she said. “Listen.”

  My name drifted up from the press tent, repeated over and over again.

  “Wait,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

  I hurried down the hill and grabbed the phone handed to me by a volunteer who stepped back with a queer, uncertain grin.

  “I spoke to Bushmill,” Kelly said. “It just happened.”

  I tried to concentrate. “Good.”

  “He’s this crusty old guy, with a face like splintered wood. He looks like a cowboy who’s been out in the sun for fifty years. He comes into this committee hearing and he tells them in this gravelly voice, ‘We need twenty-three million dollars worth of roads, seven million dollars worth of sewer system and two years of deferred property taxes or we’re on our way to South Dakota. That’s my testimony, gentlemen. I’ll answer any questions.’ It was great. You should have seen the committee.”

  “So you spoke to him.”

  “I caught him in the hall afterward. I knew I probably wouldn’t get more than a couple of questions. I don’t think he’s wasted two words in his entire life. So I decided to go for broke. I said, ‘Mr. Bushmill, I wanted to talk to you about the money you lent Thomas Crane shortly after his mother died.’ And he said, ‘That’s a private matter.’”

  She paused to let the remark sink in.

  “So he turns and I grab his elbow. ‘Just one question,’ I said. ‘Did he pay you back?’ And he said, ‘That money was never intended to be paid back. But as a matter of fact, he did.’ Then his attorney stepped between us and he disappeared down the hall.”

  She waited for me to say something.

  “Cliff? Do you understand? I got him to confirm. He gave him money back then! There’s an early and private financial relationship nobody knows about.”

  “That’s great. Good job.”

  “Thanks.” Her voice was full of gratitude. “Well? What next? Do you think maybe you should ask Crane about it directly?”

  “Let me go to Berthold after the debate. Let’s do that first.”

  “All right.” I could feel her impatience. She was out in the field and she had the scent. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about what you told me about his childhood. How poor they were. I’ve gone back to the earliest things I can find about his finances. I don’t think it adds up, Cliff. You’re right. He had too much money too soon.”

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll talk more when I get to Berthold. You did good, Kelly. You did great.”

  I was looking up the hill but Robin was gone. I stood there and people stared as they passed until I realized I was still holding the phone by my ear, the single unbroken note of the dead line ringing like a car alarm into the summer air.

  That night we came to what had to be the last county fair held that summer. We came around a bend and you could see the grandstand and the midway with a Ferris wheel turning in a bright circle of colored lights. We parked in a field of dried mud and when we got out of the buses there were cheerleaders waiting at the edge of the crowd. “Hey hey press this way,” they chanted, and we followed them. There was another group waiting at each corner, high school girls, faces flushed in the unexpected heat, cheering us on, pointing us toward the bright globe of yellow light that was the grandstand.

  I was filling in for Nathan on pool duty, so I found my way to the stage and identified myself to the Secret Service. The head agent was balding and his forehead struggled up the great dome of his skull in increasingly red folds as if he were a thermometer on the verge of exploding. He was about fifty and loved to quote from U2’s Achtung Baby. He lifted an eyebrow and considered me with a mild skepticism I did not understand.

  “There’s a member of the staff looking for you,” he said. “That blonde with the legs and the walk.”

  “Where should I stand when he’s on stage?” I asked.

  “Offstage to the right,” he said, still considering me oddly. “I’ll be nearby.”

  So I stood behind the stage waiting for Crane to appear and watched the Ferris wheel turn lazily below the moon and listened to the hoarse shouts of barkers, the hollow pop of balloons and air rifles. I could smell sausages frying and caught the sweet scent of cotton candy. When Crane mounted the stairs at the back of the platform and passed through the door in the backdrop, I took my place to the right of the stage. I was looking up at him from an oblique angle and not thinking of anything when Robin peered over my shoulder.

  “There’s something I want you to see,” she said.

  “I’ve got pool duty.”

  She smiled mysteriously. “It’s okay. You’ll be fine.”

  We walked to the back of the stage, and she led me up the stairs, past two Secret Service agents. It was dark and the sound of Crane’s voice was muffled. The head of the Secret Service detail loomed in the darkness as large as a planet. He saw Robin, considered me speculatively again, as if trying to decide if I could possibly be worth it, and then nodded curtly to her. There was a narrow passage between an outer wall and the backdrop facing the audience. She took my hand and led me between the two, into darkness broken by the narrowest slivers of light. I could feel my muffled heart pounding. Robin’s mouth came up to my ear and whispered. “Right where my hand is. Look.” I saw her finger pass like a shade over one of the slivers and I felt her leaning against me, steering me toward this star.

  I pressed my cheek against unfinished wood, seeing only an opalescent blur. Then my eye adjusted, and I was staring over someone’s shoulder. Beyond us a lip of a stage, a bank of stage lights, and between them, floating in a blue haze, faces, row upon row of faces hanging in flattened perspective, watching with a blurred, identical expectation. The bleachers behind them were lost in the darkness, but the shadows moved with palpable significance and you could feel the larger crowd out there, feel them perched above you, pressing on you, all watching, all waiting.

  I was so close to Crane that when he turned his head, I had the odd sensation of having slipped inside his skin. When he spoke his voice made my spine crawl, the way you could see it ripple across the faces floating out there.

  “This is how it is,” Robin whispered in my ear. “Every day . . .”

  Crane said something, I missed exactly what, and it was like watching flowers unfold: smiles widened, eyes danced, heads snapped up, chins bobbed as if on a spring, ha
nds rocked back and forth in repressed fervor. They were tied to your heart, hanging on every hesitation in your breath.

  Then Crane said something funny, and the tether snapped and they were all laughing, loving him more for knowing when to let go. His head turned and I saw his strong chin and long forehead edged against the lights. A thin sheen of sweat glistened along the side of his jaw. His expression was detached, but with a distant melancholy, the melancholy of mysteries removed, the melancholy of the final connection.

  I could feel Robin’s lips brush my ear. “This is how it feels.”

  I snapped back from the hole, blind. She moved me gently aside and her breath caught as she lowered her eye to the vision. When she was done, we slid back out of the passage. The Secret Service agent eyed us with clinical pity as we passed. When we were back on the ground at my assigned station, the carnival spinning on in mad neon circles behind us, Robin took a nervous breath and ran her hand through her tousled hair.

  “I just wanted you to see. I wanted you to see what he means.”

  I felt my heart pounding. There had been something too intimate about what we had done, like peering into a keyhole and catching someone you have always respected undressing before a mirror.

  “I never told you this,” Robin said, “but after my brother died, I had the same dream over and over again. It was night and I was walking up the steps to my parents’ house. The big one down by the river. But it wasn’t my family. I was a visitor, going to see my brother. I’d be walking up the steps and across the porch and I’d be happy, because I’d be thinking, I’m going to see Tim. And I’d walk through the door and my parents would be in the middle of the room crying and then I’d remember he’s dead. And it would be this terrible sense of loss, all over again. Every time. Like it had just happened.”

  She ran her hand through her hair and there was part of her that looked ready to run and part of her ready to stand and fight.

  “You want so much to believe in something at times like that,” she said. “And what do you have but other people. And they’re bound to let you down.”

  “Listen—”

  She grabbed my arms.

  “Listen to that.”

  The crowd was cheering, the sound sweeping up and filling the grandstand like some vast migration of souls taking wing.

  “I hear them,” I said.

  “But listen to them.”

  “I am—”

  “No. You’re not. Don’t you see how much this is? Don’t you see how special? Don’t you see how lucky we are to be here, right now, together?”

  “This ends,” I said.

  “Yes! It does.”

  I heard Crane coming down the stairs. The crowd swung around the stage to get close to him and the line of cops behind Robin swayed like a wind-blown daisy chain.

  “I asked too much from the future before,” Robin said. “I don’t want to make that mistake again.”

  “We don’t have to,” I said. “We have nothing to be afraid of—”

  Robin smiled at the sky. “Oh Christ, Cliff.”

  Crane swept around the corner, the crowd calling to him, moving, trying to get ahead of him for a chance to touch his hand, meet his eyes, tell their story.

  “You’ve got to go to work,” Robin said.

  I slipped into his wake and it pulled me toward the crowd. I turned once to look for Robin but she had disappeared. I stood behind Crane while he worked his way down the rope line. A dozen hands reached for each of his as he bent into the crowd. They struggled and shifted to be near him and you could hear their voices like a ragged chorus of children calling for his attention. He shook hands, slapped palms, held children, bent deep into the tangled mass of bodies to touch the fingers of a particularly devout woman while the Secret Service agents in front and behind him watched apprehensively, eyes flitting back and forth. Heat rose from the bodies and his shirt turned a stained gray as he moved down the line. All the time he kept up a steady monologue how are you . . . need your support . . . thanks . . . we will, we will . . . how are you . . . thanks . . . how are you . . . until a man stopped him with a story and he listened while the crowd knotted around them, and he spoke quietly to the person who had poured out his heart before moving on.

  We worked our way to the end of the rope line and then we reached the parking lot and he turned and waved at the crowd streaming toward their cars. His face was red and sweat made him blink. The cheerleaders were climbing into a bus and he watched them file past, glancing at him with shyly excited eyes as they climbed through the door.

  He took it all in as if it had belonged to him since birth, his eyes registering that faint disappointment, as if the world could never quite measure up, and I found myself angry at his presumption, the false sense of ordination, as if the world came with promises for anyone.

  “How many of these people, Cliff, do you think can tell you more than ten words of what I just said?”

  The words left my perception in ruin. I could cause him trouble by repeating that line. It was so exposed, an expression of such essential trust, that I stood ashamed of myself.

  “I have this sense sometimes,” Crane said, “of someone leaving from the back of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural saying, ‘Well, he’s tall and he wears a good hat, but what’s all that stuff about the bondsmen and the lash?”’

  “And you don’t even have the hat,” I managed.

  He was watching the crowd, but he smiled.

  “I don’t want the hat.”

  “What do you want, Senator?”

  He hesitated and I thought for a moment he might answer, and I would have the whole thing explained to me.

  “Malice toward none,” he intoned. “Charity toward all. Firmness in the right as God gives us the strength to see the right.”

  “Charity toward all.”

  My voice sounded like the voice of the dead. Crane placed a hand on my shoulder, and I could tell he wanted to say something that would help, but he didn’t know where to start, which only made the gesture all the more intimate.

  “Or a few words half as good as those, anyway,” he said. “But maybe you’ll write the phrase people remember this time.”

  “I don’t think what I do is that grand, Senator.”

  John Starke was leading an elderly couple our way, the woman in a formal blue dress with a string of pearls, the man in an undertaker’s suit, both of them moving with great dignity, as if they were concluding the essential pilgrimage of their lives.

  Crane smiled at them, welcoming them forward, and then, in the brief moment of their passage, he faced me and said, “Don’t ever sell yourself short, Cliff. It’s the first mistake people from places like ours make.”

  I watched him until he was safely in the limousine and then I couldn’t find the pool van, so I climbed into the regular press bus. Nathan was sitting in a front seat, frantically going through his notebooks, nothing but empty pages riffling by under the dome light. I heard Myra’s stifled laughter as I took a seat in back.

  I watched the flat, black country pass and found myself thinking about the day I realized I held the power to shape the story of someone’s life. It was my first job, with a weekly newspaper in Rothko, Montana. I had put the paper out the night before and had taken the morning off to golf in a light rain. I had just teed off on the first hole when the police car came rolling out of the mist. I walked to the fence and talked to the chief through his rolled-down window.

  “There’s been some kind of accident on the railroad tracks,” he said. “Thought you’d want to know.”

  I loaded the Nikon in the car, ratcheting the film into the camera carefully, afraid it would thread improperly. I drove to the center of town where the railroad tracks ran past the grain elevator and a long warehouse the color of ash. The ambulance sat between the two buildings. Men from the city rescue crew, wearing elbow-length green rubber gloves, walked along the track, bending now and then to pick something up. The rain was falling just hard enough
to sting my eyes. I watched the grain and coal dust that covered the siding turning to paste. I saw two members of the rescue crew coming up the track. They carried a heavily sagging green bag, one at each end, moving as if something fragile was inside. They came partway and one of them raised a hand and they set the bag down. The one in front bent over and picked up something that was a deep bruised red, heavy as a stone, a tattered green strip of cloth with part of a foot attached. He set it into the bag and zipped it closed. He stood and they both stood without lifting the bag for a moment, the man who had done the work holding his arms out so the rain hit his gloves and the rubber fingers began to drip water the color of weak tea.

  “Franklin Nies,” he shouted. “Sat down in front of a coal train. We talked to the engineer on the radio. Didn’t even know he’d hit anything.”

  I was new in town but I knew Franklin Nies. He had owned the hardware store for thirty years before turning it over to his son. He had a boxful of souvenirs from his time in World War II that he loved to show strangers: a strange Italian sash picked up at Anzio, an old German helmet, an officer’s sword.

  I took pictures of the ambulance and the men working in the rain. I drove to the home of Franklin Nies’s son. He had been called by the police and he was there with his wife, waiting quietly. He didn’t have any idea why his father would sit down on the tracks. He said his father had been going down to watch the trains for weeks, but they never thought anything about it. “I didn’t think he was sad,” he said. “He seemed the same.”

  The rain was falling harder by then. I went back to the office, and I was shaking out my jacket when one of the older women who wrote our local social notes asked me what had happened. I told her and she shook her head.

  “Poor Franklin. What are you going to do?”

  I was twenty-one and full of my father’s ideals. The truth was the truth was the truth. “I’m going to write a story,” I said.