by Reed Karaim
As Crane was finishing he caught sight of Stuart sitting in the next booth picking his way disdainfully through a plate of chiles and eggs he had apparently ordered in a case of mistranslation.
“Pretend it’s grits, Stuart,” Crane said, winking at the confused young woman in a black business suit who stood in front of him. “Just pretend it’s grits and cornbread.”
They had reordered the schedule the night before, and we hopscotched north and west. It was late September, and spending time in the South made no sense except perhaps as an act of perverse defiance. Still, we stopped in Georgia and took a one-day bus trip across the state. Maureen Barstow was on television for three nights in a row after her first appearance, visiting talk shows and news shows, hitting all the major networks and working her way across the news cable channels. I saw her in rebroadcasts early in the morning, and she was resolutely uncute, implacably dignified. I could see now it was inevitable she would come back to face us. She’d raised a daughter alone in a small town without complaint for seventeen years. There was too much pride in the choices she’d made to think she’d let me or anyone else have the last word.
Still, she couldn’t change what had happened. She couldn’t erase what people had felt once and how they felt they’d been let down. The crowds that trooped across fields, gathered in courthouse squares, and waited in parks were sullen and suspicious, and the protesters were always there. There was no organization in this haphazard, thrown-together trip to keep them out. But none of it really mattered anymore. Crane spoke through chants and discontented silence. He ignored waving signs and bouncing dolls. In Valdosta, Georgia, he took questions until two in the morning on the steps of the courthouse, and in the end there was no one left but a circle of teenagers, black and white, gathered around a memorial to the soldiers of the Confederacy, which they treated like an old park bench. He came down and sat with them and you couldn’t hear his words, but you could see them laughing, and you saw something familiar in the careless way he leaned against the base of the memorial pillar, the way he tilted his head to hear one soft-spoken boy, the flash of a reassuring smile.
The Secret Service was horrified at the way he had worked the crowd that waited to speak to him at the stop before, wading into it until he was surrounded and they could do nothing. They were furious that he had sat down with the teenagers at the end of the night in a position where they could only stand on the edge of the circle. There was a fight about it between the head of the detail and Duprey outside a hotel in Memphis.
“You might as well put him in a fucking shooting gallery,” the agent said.
Duprey turned, started to walk away, and then stopped, smiling with the mad light in his eyes.
“You try to talk him out of it,” Duprey said. “Go ahead. Tell him to be careful. Tell him to be cautious. Do it. See how far you get.”
I had been losing weight since I came back and other members of the press had observed that I did not look well. I told them I thought I might be coming down with something. People on campaigns are always coming down with something and nobody ever remembers to ask if they actually got sick. It was a good answer and it served me well until I found myself leaning over the toilet in a Comfort Inn in Denver, sweat beading on my forehead, the faded fleur-de-lis on the wallpaper swimming through my fever. I threw up and huddled against the wall, laughing. I had come down with something.
The phone rang and I crawled across the carpet to get it. Ellen sounded exhausted.
“Cliff, listen. I have a couple of questions.”
“What time is it there?”
Her voice was distracted, impatient. “I don’t know . . . About two. Listen. When you interviewed Maureen Barstow, you identified yourself as a reporter with Cannon Newspapers in the beginning, right?”
“Of course.”
“And you never sought to speak to her daughter behind her back?”
“What? I’ve never spoken to her daughter.”
“You never went to the high school or tried to grab her after school?”
I leaned against the bathroom doorway. Through the window I could see the Brown Hotel across the street. Crane was over there somewhere in a suite with his wife. Angela had reappeared this morning, emerging from the elevator at his side, her hand discreetly in his, a tight smile on her face as she contemplated our startled throng in the lobby and passed without saying a word. Lights were on up and down the hotel. I wondered if one of them was theirs. In my fever the silhouettes of Thomas and Angela Crane seemed to float in half a dozen squares of waxen light.
“Ellen. You know the answers to all these questions.”
“I have one more, Cliff. You did not threaten to interview Maureen’s daughter if she would not speak to you on the record.”
“I did not threaten Maureen’s daughter. What is going on?”
She took a deep breath. “We’re getting over a thousand letters a day. It just keeps going up. They wander out of their offices in San Diego and they go to dinner and they hear these things and, of course, because they come from a podiatrist or a lawyer, they believe them, and everything they’ve been told by their editors and reporters for months becomes suspect, and they call here and talk to Nelson and he talks to me and I talk to you and it’s like all of us have never handled a story before in our lives.”
There was a ragged edge to her voice I’d never heard before, but she regained control after a moment of silence.
“Listen, Cliff. We don’t have a complicated theology. We find out the truth and we tell people so they can make up their own minds. Everything else is just bullshit.”
I watched the walls ripple ever so slightly.
“You wrote a good story, Cliff. It’s the only thing anyone will remember when this is over.”
“Right. Thanks.”
“Don’t forget that.”
“You’re a good editor, Ellen.”
Her laugh was a bark. “Go to bed. You sound like you might be coming down with something.”
I pulled myself over to the couch and closed my eyes again. A thousand letters a day. I could feel the earth tilting beneath my feet.
The fever was gone the next morning. My skin felt like it was made out of tissue paper and my head felt as light as a balloon, but the world held still and thoughts came very clearly and quietly, each word arriving by itself in the middle of a blank sheet of paper. There were mountains floating above Denver, so sharp and blue they hurt my eyes.
Stuart stood at the edge of the press pen reading the New York Times. I glimpsed the headline on the op-ed page: “The Press as Misguided Moralists—Why Cannon Newspapers Was Wrong.” He realized I was looking over his shoulder and folded the paper shut. His sallow cheeks colored faintly. “You don’t want to read that. Baker’s always been as sanctimonious as shit.”
We were in a downtown plaza of some kind. I thought I should know the name but I couldn’t remember it. The press pen was off to one side on the sidewalk. The audience, running down the street next to us, stared enviously at the boxes of donuts and pot of coffee set up for us on a corner of a metal folding table. I helped myself to a cup.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “After you’ve been called a purveyor of tabloid sensationalism by People, you start to develop a healthy perspective on the whole thing.”
Stuart looked away. “It’s too bad you didn’t get her side of the story when you first talked to her,” he said. “Might have made for a more complicated piece.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll try to do better next time I break the story of the year.”
He looked at me, saw Starke crossing in front of the stage behind my shoulder, and seized the chance to escape. I picked the paper up off the table and read: It seems clear now that Thomas Crane’s character is, judged by a realistic standard, more honorable than that of those who have pursued him. As Maureen Barstow has testified repeatedly, the choices he made in his life concerning his daughter were made to satisfy the mother of his child, a
s they should have been. I confess I was one who originally doubted Thomas Crane’s substance. When he burst upon the political scene during the primary season, I feared a pretty boy, a false purveyor of another Camelot. But it’s become clear that his life has tested him in a way we had never imagined. Character? Yes, character is and always should be an issue in any presidential campaign. But in the crucible of this last month, we have discovered much about the character of Thomas Crane and of those who have blindly exposed his deepest secrets, and it is not the candidate who has been found wanting—
I put the paper down. People were pressed up against the edge of the sidewalk, held back only by orange rope. The mayor was speaking and their eyes were on the stage. They looked like the crowds we saw everywhere these days, a strange apprehension on their faces, as if they weren’t quite sure what they had come to see, but they expected it to be curious and strange and maybe tragic. They filled the plaza back beyond sight. We hadn’t had an audience this size for a while. It left me with a queasy feeling in my stomach.
Myra wandered up. “Have you seen Nathan yet?”
I shook my head.
She smiled. “He’s wearing the cutest little outfit. They lost his clothes again. Yes. There he is!”
I followed her finger and saw Nathan hovering uncertainly behind the stage, a pair of jeans rolled up until they looked like balloons around his ankles, a purple jersey hanging down to his knees.
“It’s sad, really,” Myra said. “Think of all those carefully polished gold cufflinks, those perfectly tailored jackets, sitting somewhere in some dark hotel closet. It’s like the lost treasure of the Incas.”
I couldn’t manage anything in response. She waited and then stared with me into the crowd.
“What did you think about Baker’s column today?” I asked.
Myra shrugged. “He’s never been able to write.”
“Everyone knows that. I mean what he said about Crane’s character.”
“I think you shouldn’t read the editorial pages, cowboy. Not for a while, anyway.”
She stood beside me while Crane appeared at the back of the stage. He crossed to the podium, looking out into the audience running down the plaza, and the sight of all of them seemed to fill him with grim satisfaction, as if he would get his chance here. They were silent while he was introduced and they applauded modestly when he took the microphone. I listened and waited for it to begin. The chant started in back, but the breeze seemed to carry it away. You could see the dolls, pale and small, like a child sacrifice in the distance. Yet you could hear Crane and I realized most of the people were listening to him with a curious intensity, as if they had come to see what wisdom could come out of his misadventure.
For the rest of the speech, the chants drifted in and out as the wind rose and fell. But he was able to finish, and as he realized he was going to be able to finish with most of those present listening, hearing what he was saying, his tempo picked up. There was even a moment when he paused, daring to give the protesters the air uncontested, while he surveyed the crowd with the triumphant eye of a battered fighter who realizes he has fought his way to a draw, at least for this round.
When he finished he descended from the front of the stage. They pushed forward along the rope, an old man with long wiry arms and a head of closely cropped white hair throwing his arms around Crane, whispering feverishly into his ear.
“He was never this good before,” Myra said. “He’s better now than he ever was. He’s all here.”
She started to slide down the sidewalk toward the edge of the crowd, pen in hand.
“He owes that to you, if nothing else. Gotta go talk to America.”
I watched her move down the rope line. Crane was making his way toward me along the edge of the audience, swallowed up and then emerging, leaning forward and letting them have him again, disappearing into a surge of bodies. You could see the yearning for contact in the faces of those waiting ahead as clearly as if it had been cut into glass.
I pulled my cell phone out of my bag and called my editor.
“Listen,” I said. “I want to try to talk to Maureen.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“We’re up in Missouri the day after tomorrow and from there I can hop off and drive to Berthold. Mary can fly in. I can catch up with the campaign in Chicago.”
Ellen took a long time to speak. “For God’s sake, Cliff. Why do you want to do this?”
“We haven’t gotten another interview. I think she might speak to me.”
“You know her daughter’s still staying somewhere else.”
“I know. It’s her I want to talk to. We haven’t gotten an interview since she went public. I think we should try.”
My breathing sounded too loud on the phone. I held the receiver away from my mouth.
“This is crazy,” Ellen said.
“No. I’m the person she first spoke to about this.”
“Cliff! I’m sitting here dealing with rumors that you stalked her daughter through the high school and you want to go back there and show up on her front step. Are you out of your mind?”
Crane was moving along the edge of the crowd, coming closer. I pushed myself back against a building.
“What if it works? What if she gives me another interview? I know more of their story than anyone, Ellen. What if she talks to me?”
She took a deep breath. “No. You can call Nelson, but the whole idea will scare him so shitless he might yank you off the road tomorrow.”
“Listen—”
“We have requested a follow-up interview and we have been turned down, Cliff. Mary has made fifteen calls. The answer is no.”
VII.
WE TURNED toward the Midwest. We were making every stop we could squeeze in and a giddy feeling overcame the entire campaign, the feeling you have tobogganing down a steep hill late at night, the feeling of gliding into the dark, the air cold and sharp against your skin, trees flying past, the snow spraying your face and the hill becoming a cloud of white through which you fall until everything flies by too fast for comprehension and you descend in a rush of wind and ice and air and night.
We had to make a brief detour into South Dakota to honor a commitment made much earlier, and we arrived at our hotel in Sioux Falls half-drunk with travel and a frozen wind blowing unseasonably from the North. The lobby was tall and badly lit. We poured through the revolving doors in a shivering horde.
“You gotta love this northern climate,” Nathan said, pounding his chest, clearly enjoying the noise his gloves made.
Stuart’s nose looked as if it had been left outside overnight. He stared down its pale, bloodless ridge in distaste.
“I’ve always thought winter was one of God’s little mistakes.”
Myra was wearing a Chicago Bears stocking cap pulled down low. She marched past him to the desk to pick up her keys.
“This isn’t winter, Stuart. You’d die in winter up here.”
We fell into line at the temporary desk set up in the middle of the lobby. Nathan rocked back and forth on his heels, swinging his arms. A high flush colored his cheeks and his eyes sparkled.
“We’ve got time for one drink before they close the bar.”
Myra nodded. “Something warm. Something with decaf coffee and liquor and whipped cream on top.”
“Something with liquor anyway,” Stuart said.
“He looked pretty good in there tonight, didn’t he?” Nathan said.
“Christ, don’t start,” Myra said. “We can have a drink if we all agree not to discuss how good he looked, how hard he’s campaigning, blah blah fucking blah.”
“But he was sharp.”
“It’s easy to look great when you’ve got nothing to lose,” Stuart said.
“Or it’s really hard.” Myra pulled down her stocking cap so she was staring out of two eyeholes like someone about to rob a 7-Eleven. “It’s one of those two.”
“The point is it doesn’t matter,”
Stuart said.
“God, not the point. Anything but the point. The point is I want a coffee drink with whipped cream.”
Myra reached the woman with frosted hair waiting behind the table, gave her name and received a manila envelope, room number scrawled across the top in Magic Marker.
“Momma’s home,” she said.
Half of us got envelopes, the rest were sent to the front desk. The rooms hadn’t been right for a month. Nathan waited for us by the elevators, bundled up in two different layers of sweatpants and sweatshirts purchased at hotel gift shops during the last week.
“We’ll meet down here in fifteen minutes.”
My bags weren’t waiting for me at my door as scheduled. I went inside and sat down on the edge of the bed, my head swimming. I’d had three beers on the plane. I couldn’t face going back downstairs. I couldn’t face the reckless euphoria that had descended on everyone trailing this lost cause. I couldn’t face hearing Nathan or anyone rattle on and on. He looked pretty good out there. Who? Who looked pretty good out there? Who was he? I sat motionless for fifteen minutes, hearing Maureen Barstow’s voice in my head and then a babble of others, until I fell asleep on the edge of the bed in my clothes.
The next day I can’t tell you where we stopped or how many times, only that we ended up in Missouri. I stood in the back and looked at the sky, which was bright blue and cloudless all day. In late afternoon I stopped Myra outside the plane.
“I’m going to be gone for the rest of the day,” I told her. “Keep an eye on things and call me if anything happens.”
She looked confused.
“When is Mary showing up?” she asked.
“I don’t know. She might not get here tonight. Just call me if anything happens.”
“You’re leaving him uncovered?”
“Just for tonight. I’ll catch up tomorrow.”
“Cowboy,” Myra said. “Hoss. Think about this.”
“Just don’t let him get shot. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
