by Reed Karaim
It was hard to be certain what was worse, the dolls or the signs with the aborted fetuses a bright red splash in their centers. They sprouted everywhere. In Memphis the signs slapped against the windows of his limousine, halting the motorcade before the police linked arms around the car. They pounded against the side of the bus as we passed, the dull chants of Murderer Murderer like a ghostly echo of the rain.
“I don’t get this,” Myra said. “He’s going splat because she didn’t have an abortion.”
Randall Craig smiled through his window at the protesters, as if they were cheering us. “They were right about him all along. They said he was a liar and he is. They have the righteous rage of the prophets. And that, my friends, is one powerful, fucking rage.”
“It’s about hypocrisy,” Stuart said. “The South knows hypocrisy in its bones.”
I raised my eyes and beyond the signs I saw hundreds of other faces, blurred and indistinct, watching with a sullen silence. They were the ones that mattered, the ones who had taken a chance and allowed themselves to believe he was different from a ruling class they held in contempt. They were the ones you saw him searching for when he briefly, inevitably, raised his eyes during every speech and stared past the dolls and the posters for a sign of recognition.
When Starke had walked silently past my seat on my first day back, he had declared my status with unusual precision. I was a nonperson to the staff from the moment I reappeared. They could have kept me off the road—Cannon Newspapers would have folded if they’d insisted—but they’d been too dispirited at the time. Now I was as close to invisible as they could manage. If I made a request in front of others, they answered as briefly as possible. If I spoke to them privately they walked away without a word. Still, there was no other retaliation, and after a while I understood: The contemptability of what I had done would be underscored every day by the nobility of their response. I would get my turns in the best hotels; my bags would be delivered. I would be treated like everyone else in every way, except, of course, no one could be expected to hide how they felt about me. That would be too much to ask.
There was one other thing. My name had disappeared from the pool list. The list was alphabetical and kept track of what print reporter would be part of the small group that stuck close to the candidate at each event. But my name was no longer on it. It was clear I would never get near Thomas Crane again.
On my third morning back I was sitting in the lobby when Myra came down wearing black jeans and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt.
“I’m glad to see you haven’t lost your sense of style,” I said.
It was very early in the morning. I was alone on a couch with the early paper because I hadn’t been able to sleep. There were a dozen empty seats but Myra grimaced and sat down beside me.
“I’m glad to see you haven’t lost your charm,” she said.
“Oh no. Just ask around.”
She slumped into the couch. “I’ve got pool duty this morning, but I’ve got to write. You wanna take a turn?”
Gratitude swept over me, then fear.
“Are you sure?”
Myra glanced impatiently around the deserted lobby. “Where the hell can you get a cup of coffee in this place? Yeah, why not? It should be your turn anyway.”
“They’re going to be mad as hell at you.”
She smiled. “I know. Fuck them. What’s the worst they can do? Give me back my life? It’s yours if you want it. But Cliff, just so you know—it’s not so nice out there right now.”
“I’ve been watching.”
“You haven’t seen it up close.”
“Then maybe it’s time.”
She pulled her sunglasses down off her head. “All right, cowboy. Have fun.”
An hour later I was standing on a terrace in downtown Lexington. No one had tried to stop me, and I was checked in with the Secret Service and in place, less than thirty feet from the podium. Crane would come out a door behind us eventually, but I didn’t want to think about what would happen then. I reveled in this moment, this small sense of return, watching people gather on the plaza below, feeling again the surreal vividness of so many unknown yet always familiar faces. It was amazing, the physical presence of a crowd, how alive it is, how it concentrates and makes tangible the human spirit, the way a bent and tossed forest makes real the wind.
I knew when he came through the door by the way the people spread out below me were suddenly still. I turned to see him marching across the terrace, a poor shivering city councilman pressed into duty by his side. I hadn’t been this close to him since returning, and he seemed taller than I remembered, but it was only a reflection of how thin he had grown, how the carefully creased legs of his trousers flapped around his legs. He walked with a stiff-legged gait, as if his knees were locked, his gaze lifted above the crowd, and he seemed curiously absent, as if he had already removed himself from whatever disaster came next. He didn’t notice me. I was standing to the side, but I had the feeling I could step in front of him and it would be the same.
The council member, young and fair-haired, managed to drawl a few dozen nervous words before hopping back from the microphone. The sun was still low and most of the crowd, in long rectangular shadows slanting from the buildings around the plaza, milled with uneasy anticipation in the cold.
When Thomas Crane reached the podium, a strange exhalation rose from below, a huhhh like when the air has been knocked out of your stomach. There was also applause, of course, thin but feverish, from the true believers near the front of the stage. He seemed to waver in the audible breath as he unfolded the pages held in his suit pocket. I watched his hands and they fumbled but did not shake.
He spoke quietly at first, his voice inflectionless but clear. There was a kind of dignity in it, and I don’t know if they were surprised, or if they had to steel themselves, or if perhaps there was some faint stirring of shame in their hearts, the melancholy of the executioner as the doomed man raises his eyes with one last plea for charity, but they let him go for a few minutes.
The chant began in the back, and at first it wasn’t too loud: Crane, Crane, what’s her name? Crane, Crane, what’s her name? He bent into the sound and continued. The chant rose steadily and when he hesitated and let his eyes search for the source, it swept forward through part of the crowd and then the dolls began bouncing up and down, wide-eyed and surprised. The bloodred signs appeared, while around them another chant arose: Ten million dead! Ten million dead! I’d heard it all before, of course, heard it already in my few days back, but I’d never felt it before, felt the way the words battered against your chest in a blood rush, felt the way they heated the air and filled you with a sense of shame as if you must, must deserve this in some inescapable, final judgment. The choruses crashed against each other and Crane’s voice lost momentum and disappeared. On stage the council member took another unconscious step away from him. Crane gripped the edge of the podium so hard I saw his knuckles whiten. His voice rose in the mechanical singsong I remembered from the press conference. He was bent at the waist now, leaning forward as if into a gale.
A crumpled paper cup flew out of the crowd and landed on the steps leading up to the terrace. I saw the Secret Service agents flinch and then heard and felt, as if it were a hand against my chest, the chanting climb a notch. In front near the stage, his supporters were yelling back at the protesters in an antiphonal hysteria. They surged backward and the rest of the crowd surged toward them and I saw a sign come down like an ax, rise and then fall again, the sound lost in the din. Crane stepped back from the podium, holding his hands up in defeat. They should have taken us straight back into the door then, but the campaign was in chaos, and someone in Lexington, who did not understand how things had changed, had planned Crane’s exit through the crowd.
The Secret Service led Crane down the steps to a roped-off corridor across the plaza. We descended into a forest of arms and legs and bodies piling up along the edge of the rope as people climbed over each other’s b
acks to reach him. The agents moved ahead of Crane, shouting “Hands out! Hands out!” slapping wildly at hands in pockets. They fell into a tight circle around him, the collars of their shirts going dark with sweat, their eyes darting, heads swinging back and forth. They couldn’t keep the crowd back. It pressed in on both sides, stretching the rope line, trampling it down and pressing into the corridor, reaching out, grabbing his hands, his sleeves, his shoulders, faces tumbling into view and then falling, sliding by senseless of where they landed as they tried to catch his eye. They yelled for him to hang in there, yelled for him to remember the veterans, yelled for him to stop for a moment, yelled that they still believed, yelled he was a lying bastard, yelled that God would judge. He moved through them with his arms extended on each side, his hands touching hundreds of hands, never stopping, never slowing down, moving with a measured mechanical pace, seeming somehow still to shrink farther within himself, despite the nodding of his chin, the strangely murmured words he managed out of old habit, thank you, thank you, need your support, thank you, need your vote, words that seemed to come breathlessly out of the air somewhere in front of his lips, while fingers tugged at his sleeves, climbed up his arms, and traveling behind him, you moved through the heat and the shifting bodies, seeing a red coat, a shock of blond hair, sea blue eyes, an emaciated hand clenching a soiled letter, a woman in a plastic raincoat falling to her knees, all shifting, turning, clinging to the moment of his passage, and above it, the keening, the hoarse tangle of voices begging to be heard. We were almost through the plaza when we came to the dolls, bobbing like a ghostly drunken chorus. Crane moved like a sleepwalker. The agents’ faces were shining with sweat as they pushed hands back and out of the way, shouldered our way forward. The path was coming to an end. You could see the edge of the crowd ahead.
A child with a halo of blond hair floated screaming into the corridor. Disembodied arms held her in the air, a sign hanging from her neck. Daddy. Crane stopped and when someone fell against him he stumbled sideways toward the crowd. An agent slid underneath his shoulder, another leaned against his back and they moved him forward. The agent ahead of them reached roughly for the child, but she was pulled back into the wall of bodies. The Secret Service held Crane erect and I followed them through hands that slipped grasping along my shoulders and past a final voice shouting something I could not understand and out of the crowd and around a corner where the limousine was waiting.
They tried to hustle him directly into the car, but he stopped at the door. The head of the detail was swearing violently at a trembling young aide while the agents with Crane clung to their defensive circle. Crane glanced around the car in a panic.
“Where’s my wife? My wife, where is she?”
The woman agent who had been guarding his back looked at him curiously.
“She’s in the hotel, Senator. She never left.”
Crane nodded slowly, all his attention fixed on her, as if she was the most important person in the world, the only one who understood him.
“Of course,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
He clenched something in his right hand. He saw me and there was a moment of disbelief and then a kind of acknowledgment, as if it was only right that I should be there. Crane glanced at the thing in his fist and handed it to the agent.
“Give this to him,” he said and disappeared into the car.
She looked at it and then at me. She held it out to me palm down, so I couldn’t tell what it was until it was in my hand.
When I climbed into the pool van, they were quiet until Randall Craig, sitting in back with the CNN camera crew, leaned forward.
“It’s been like that for more than a week,” he said. “Nice story.”
“Fuck you.”
I tossed him the thing in my hand. He caught it blindly and held it up, speechless for once. The plastic leg of a doll.
That night on the tarmac I saw Robin walking toward the plane with Duprey and Starke. A handful of reporters followed them, but no one bothered her. Issues didn’t matter anymore. They stopped by the stairway at the back of the plane, and she waited to one side, skinny arms hugging her chest against the wind.
I was standing at the edge of the light, alone, and I don’t know how she sensed my gaze, but she did. She considered me carefully, minutely, those wide eyes settling on mine without a trace of sympathy. She stared me down until my heart fled, and then she seemed to grow bored with the whole thing and mounted the stairs to the plane.
III.
THEY TOOK Robin off the road the next day. It wasn’t fair, but she had been given the one absolutely essential assignment to befall a staff member during the entire campaign, and she had failed spectacularly. They sent her back to Springfield to head the research department, replacing her with a twenty-two-year-old who had to check and get back to you before he could answer the simplest questions. It didn’t matter much. The time when Crane’s positions were greeted in good faith had slipped away. Everything he said now was open to hard-eyed reinterpretation, attacked by a press that trailed him like a clamorous rabbinical horde, searching each syllable for deviation from past statements, discovering hypocrisy and cant everywhere.
Within the week the Times, the Post, and the Wall Street Journal weighed in with critical assessments of his personal finances, his shift on abortion, his relationships with powerful lobbyists. The stories illustrated one of journalism’s unwritten rules: If you don’t have the big story when it breaks, you better find something. The tabloids had him a bigamist, a wife abuser, and dying tragically of a secret disease. Television reported all of the above without discretion in a state of barely repressed glee. The cumulative effect was to make it very clear that Thomas Crane couldn’t be trusted with a position on the local library board, much less the presidency.
Blendin and Duprey were said to be scrambling for a strategy to counter the revelation that started it all. There was talk of an attempt to paint Maureen Barstow as an unstable woman who so desperately wanted a child she had lied to Crane about being on birth control. The idea rose and sank in a day, and I think it was the kind of self-generated rumor that sweeps through the press like a stray virus when reporters are packed together and starved for real news. The next day we heard that there was going to be a public reunion between father and daughter, followed by a joint live press conference. The idea had a luridly mawkish appeal that made it irresistible to television, and it made it onto the air, but in truth, no one seemed to know where Maureen Barstow and Kara were, not even the campaign.
I couldn’t imagine the man I had known for almost a year consenting to such public humiliation. I remembered once we had been somewhere deep in Arkansas and the local mayor was also a preacher, a big weepy, white-haired man with a veined nose like W. C. Fields and soft, floury hands like those of a child. He had been going on about poor Lulu Bell, who was only seven and had cancer, and how her family’s best hope was the Crane healthcare plan, and how poor Lulu Bell’s momma and poppa had never given up hope and still believed that their government, the government of Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy and Wilbur Mills, wouldn’t let them down. Crane was standing off to the side, waiting as the mayor rolled on through great southern swamps of rhetoric, pausing at the muckiest spots with his head cocked, as if listening for applause from heaven, and finally I saw Crane lean toward Duprey and heard his dry, flat whisper: “Poor Lulu Bell’s running out of time. It’ll be a miracle if she makes it to the end of this speech.” The way he seemed to be outside his own carnival at moments like that, watching it from some safe distance with both awe and amusement, had always been one of his saving graces, one of the reasons why so many of us fell for him. I didn’t want to believe that that, too, had been a fraud.
But they were spinning spinning spinning in the Crane for President campaign, and what they came up with, and how much of his self-respect he was willing to surrender, became apparent when we swung north and landed in Philadelphia. He was standing with Angela at the base of t
he stairs leading up to the stage, and no one knows what he said. They only heard her abrupt response.
“Don’t treat me like a voter, Tom. Don’t try to woo me. Just tell me what you want.”
She spoke loudly enough to be heard by everyone behind stage. Crane stood beside her, holding himself erect, trying to smile.
“I am saying they think it might help.” His throat was raw from shouting through the protests and there was a rasp to every word.
“Oh Christ, save us from them. Forget them and everything they say. What do you want me to do?”
“I guess I think it might help. The public loves you.”
“The public thinks I’m a windup doll.”
“Not at all, Angela. Blendin says the numbers—”
Maybe it was hearing that name, maybe it was the word numbers, as if there was still hope in the shattered crystal of polls, but Angela clutched her shoulders.
“Stop it, Tom,” she said, loudly enough that the Secret Service agent on the stairs glanced back.
He stood inches away, not touching her, this helpless, misplaced smile stuck on his face like some costume-party prop, and you saw him groping backward into the past for some form of their old understanding, the privately shared cleverness that had always animated their marriage.
