If Men Were Angels

by Reed Karaim

  I rented a car at the airport and drove northeast. I was at least three hours away and it would be dark by the time I reached Phillips. I hoped no one was still staking out her house. If I ended up on camera it was all over. I also knew there was no chance she would come to the door if they were waiting for her outside. I might have to wait until the crews packed up for the night. I saw myself as a ghost waiting down the block and the image was superimposed over Thomas Crane standing in the dark as a young man. He crunched across the frozen streets of Berthold toward the highway rolling past town and I tried to apprehend his disappearing form. You know what I remember about Thomas Crane? I remember the way his voice shook in grade school if he didn’t know the answer. I remember how he threw up all day before leaving for Saint Aquinas . . . I thought he had less freedom than anyone I’d ever known. I didn’t know the person she was talking about, had never met him, didn’t want to think he existed. But I could see him standing on the side of the road as well as I had ever been able to see anyone, and I knew him too well. For the first time I understood him.

  I drove to Phillips and there was no one outside the house. The lights were out and it was only as I walked up the driveway that I saw how the lawn had been torn up, broken and frozen now in cusps of mud and matted grass. A broken limb hung limply from the apple tree. I knocked on the door and no one answered. I knocked again and waited. The lights came on next door and I saw a face peering through a blind. The night was clear and cold. You could stare up and see the unblinking stars.

  I went back to the car and sat there for a while, trying to decide what to do next. There was one more place to go. I pulled back out on the highway and headed toward Berthold.

  We have only a few days left now. You know the end of the story as you knew so much of it. You know him and you know me. You don’t know Robin, except perhaps as a face on television that stopped you for a moment with its beauty, the sincerity in the nervous rush of words. She always spoke a little too fast on television, as if there wasn’t quite enough time to say all that she felt. She always walked a little too fast. She hurried through life as if some part of it was getting away, some chance to change the shape of things.

  It is hard to escape a face that shows up at the oddest hours in the box, speaking briefly from Springfield on CNN or ABC. It is hard to escape a voice you hear without warning on a radio or stumble across in the third column of a story. She was never really gone and, if I have not stopped each day or so to record her appearances, it is because of some, probably absurd, sense of pride, a desire to create an impression of final dignity. I waited during my first days back for someone to ask me about her, but we had been more discreet than I realized, and those who suspected—Duprey, Myra, I don’t think there were more than that—had their own loyalties and their own codes of behavior. So we were saved by the decency of others, and within a week Robin was back on television, answering questions when others were too tired or defeated. Her banishment came up against her determination and didn’t have a chance. So she was never really gone, and while I drive up the highway I want you to think of her as I did that night, bent over a desk somewhere, still trying, still believing that it mattered.

  I parked across from the cottage. The lights were on in the back and the thought that he was there made it hard to get out of the car. But I did, and crossed the sagging porch, and knocked and then stomped until the door opened and I saw the pink dome of his forehead and then raised eyes, growing black as they recognized me. He rolled violently forward and yanked the storm door open, and I thought he was going to roll right onto the porch and throw himself at me, but he stopped and I felt the heat escaping around him.

  “Can I come in?”

  Bill Crane clutched the wheels of his chair, rolled back half an inch, then jerked himself forward.

  “I wish I had my legs. I wish I could kick the living shit out of you.”

  “I need to know some things.”

  “You need to know some things. You don’t know a goddamn thing.”

  I stood on his porch and his anger seemed not to matter at all.

  “Were we all wrong about him?” I said. “I don’t mean about his daughter. I mean about everything else.”

  I could see the television flickering in the room behind him, smell fried potatoes.

  “Tell me and I’ll go away.”

  He held the wheels so tightly his shoulders were bunched in a knot. He rolled sideways absently, rolled back. He couldn’t keep still. He seemed to be straining to lift himself out of the chair.

  “Have you ever seen yourself on television?” Bill Crane said. “Has it ever been you?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t think you’ve spent one day with my brother.”

  “We used to talk about history,” I said. “Ulysses S. Grant.”

  He stared at me in disbelief. “Ahh, Jesus Christ. Goddamnit.” He rolled back from the door and I followed him into the living room. His half-finished dinner was sitting on a corner of the table, hamburger and potatoes. He turned off the television and spun around in the middle of the linoleum floor.

  “You see some things. You see how smart he is. You see that he’s good with people, has a way of making them feel good, making them feel that he cares. You see these things and you think he must be slick, because everybody who’s like that is slick. And maybe he is a little slick, goddamnit, because nobody can be a grown man and a politician and not be a little slick. And you see that he’s got some money and he’s got himself a good-looking wife, and you figure it must have been easy for him. You think it must have been a cakewalk. That this is how it is. That it’s always been like this. And you’re all jealous, because you’re not there. You don’t have it. You’re not the one they’re all cheering for. And you think you gotta bring him down—”

  “No,” I said. “That’s not it.”

  “Like hell—”

  “No. You have to believe me. That wasn’t it. I thought I knew.”

  His face was beet red. He was breathing hard. He stared at the floor trying to steady himself.

  “What did you think you knew?”

  “The truth.”

  He looked at me without comprehension.

  “I thought I knew who he was.”

  There was a light on in the kitchen and nowhere else, a square of yellow falling outward from the kitchen door, long shadows around the table, the rest of the room in darkness. There was no wind but I thought I could hear the cornfield creak in the cold.

  “You knew who he was,” Bill said.

  “I thought so.”

  He rolled his chair around the table until he was only a few inches from me, his head resting heavily on his shoulders, his thin gray mustache incongruously tidy beneath his uneven nose.

  “This is my brother to me. This is what I remembered when I was watching that slide show they put on at the convention. You know, the one where they made our house look like some pretty cottage in Fairyland. I started thinking about when our old man died. Tommy had just been elected to Congress then, and everybody was excited about him. We had the funeral up on the hill and then we came back here. Folks kept coming by all day. One thing about a small town, they show up for your funeral whether they think you were a son of a bitch or not.”

  He smiled. He wasn’t looking at me anymore but out the window and into the outer dark.

  “There were all these people coming by. We were sitting here, taking all the food and shit, my sister and me, and I noticed he wasn’t around. People would come in and they would look for him, right away. He was the one they really wanted to see. Hell, my sister and me, we were just more folks like them. Old news.”

  Bill rolled sideways and nodded at one of the doors on the far side of the room.

  “He was sitting in the bedroom. I come in to see what’s going on, and he’s looking out the window and he says, ‘I can’t do this.’ He says, ‘I spent half my life hating the son of a bitch for taking so long to die, and now he’s
dead and I can’t forgive him for leaving without straightening anything out. He ran Mom to death, then he left us to get him into a hospital, and then he checked out without even paying his bar tab. And I have to stand out there and hear stories about how he could dig more coal with a hang over than any other poor bastard who crawled down into that tunnel.’

  “‘Well,’ I says, ‘that would have made a more interesting speech at the church than the one you gave.’”

  Bill stopped, trying to smile, an old, uncomfortable bitterness twisting his mouth.

  “We sat there, and after a while I says, ‘The old man was better when he was younger. You shoulda seen him before he got so sick. He could pick you up and hold you in the air with one arm. He had a laugh you could hear all the way across the bar.’

  “Tommy looked at me. ‘And why were you in that bar listening to that laugh?’

  “‘Mom sent me to haul his ass out of there,’ I says.

  “‘Oh, it sounds like he was a whole lot different, Bill,’ he says.

  “Tommy’s got the flag they gave him for Dad’s time in the army, folded up in that little triangle like they do, and he’s tossed that on the bed. It’s that room where he was born, but I don’t know if he’s thinking about that. He’s just sitting there, looking out the window at the cornfield, and I’m thinking we should get back into the other room, people are wondering what happened to us. But he’s just sitting there in his fancy suit. He looked so young back then. Didn’t look old enough to drink. Couldn’t hold his liquor either.”

  Bill smiled at that. “He was always more our mother’s boy, you know.”

  The little house hung behind him in the opaque darkness, the two doors to the bedrooms black squares, the posters on the walls indistinct. He was lit in profile by the kitchen and the yellow light defined the seams of his skin, the heavy fold of his jaw, the sharp spiderwebbed corner of his eye.

  “So I’m thinking we have to get back to the other room, and then Tommy says to me, ‘I’ve always wondered, Bill, what you thought when you went off that embankment.’

  “And I say to him, ‘I thought I should’ve taken the fucking freeway.’

  “He looks at me. ‘I should have taken the fucking freeway?’

  “‘That’s right,’ I say.

  “And he starts laughing; pretty soon he’s laughing so hard he’s crying. We’re both laughing. ‘I should have taken the fucking freeway,’ he says. ‘That about says it all.’

  “We finally stop laughing and Tommy—Tommy stands up, and he says, ‘Let’s go. They’re waiting for us.’ And he marches on out there and he’s charming as hell for the rest of the night. They love him. Our old man is dead and they come out of that house smiling. He makes them all feel good. Every one of them.”

  Bill stopped, still remembering, and then his blue eyes focused on me. He rolled backward slowly, as if trying to get a fix on me, as if I would make some sense if he could just put me in the proper frame. He rolled backward, and his legs and the silver wheels passed out of the square of light from the kitchen and he floated in the shadows, pale and square, his eyes still there, like patches of winter twilight.

  “And you knew he liked history,” Bill said. “Ulysses S. Fucking Grant. And Diet Coke and baseball and fucking sunflower seeds. And you found out he had a daughter. And then you knew fucking everything. Oh, you had him figured out.”

  VIII.

  I FLEW FROM Springfield to Chicago and caught up with the campaign at McCormick Plaza the next morning. Myra saw me, shook her head, and returned her attention to the stage. I waited until the opening speaker had finished before joining her.

  “Your desk has been trying to reach you,” she said. “They were calling your name out in the press room a while back.”

  “Did I miss anything?”

  “You know, we’ve established this quaint tradition on this campaign, cowboy. We try to do our own reporting.”

  “Come on. Not now. Okay?”

  She played with the trinkets on one of her bracelets.

  “No. Maybe it went a little better. He finished. They were listening to him at the end. He gave a pretty good speech, really.”

  “Thanks.”

  “All right, Cliff. Where’d you go?”

  I tried to tell her, but I couldn’t.

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said. “I promise.”

  My cell phone was dead. I walked into the press room, ignoring the surprised glances, and found a phone. I dialed Ellen but the cheerful male voice of another editor answered, a corporate toad who’d arrived shortly before I headed out on the road.

  “Let me talk to Ellen.”

  “She’s taking a few days off, Cliff,” he said. “I’ll be handling the political coverage for a while.”

  I hadn’t slept the night before. I tried to think.

  “How long?”

  His laugh was so smooth it oozed. “Well, the rest of the campaign. When Ellen comes back, she’s going to be handling long-term projects. It’s a reward for how hard she’s been working, something she can really sink her teeth into, really do some high-altitude, touch-the-readers sort of work.”

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “She’s on vacation for a couple of days, Cliff. Maybe a week or two, who knows? She tried to reach you last night. Where the hell were you, by the way?”

  I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to think about Ellen trying to reach me one last time before they took her job from her. The long-term projects editor slot was internal exile, where you watched over the stories the bureau never finished, the ones that kept reporters a few years from retirement safely toiling away until the end. At least they hadn’t fired her. I tried to concentrate.

  “There was a mix-up with hotel rooms. I wasn’t where I was supposed to be.”

  “Really? You’d think they’d have that kind of thing all taken care of by now.” He paused and shrugged on his new cloak of authority. “Look. I suppose you know we’re getting an incredible amount of flak here. The letters and calls just keep coming in. They’re worse now than ever. Maybe if Crane had just blown up and gone away. But he keeps trying, that son of a gun.”

  The phone felt heavy against my ear.

  “Bottom line, Cliff. We’re taking you off the road. Mary can take it from here. You’ll come back to the office. Do some analysis. Some good think pieces.”

  “Don’t take me off the road, Gerald.”

  “The decision’s been made, my friend. Mary’s going out to finish up.”

  “I need to talk to Nelson about this.”

  “Oh, sure. Absolutely. Give him a call. It was his decision.”

  I looked around the press room, reporters lolling behind the fold-out tables, watching Crane on television while he spoke right through the open door, a few people writing without enthusiasm, everything so familiar it seemed like all I could remember since the beginning of time.

  “When do you want me off?”

  He was surprised I gave up so easily. “Well, Mary’s finishing up a story and she needs a couple of days. We were thinking Saturday. The wire schedule says you’re supposed to be out west. She’ll fly out and you can do the switch there.”

  “Saturday.”

  “That’s right. Don’t worry about coming in Monday or Tuesday. Take some time off. Get some rest, all right, buddy? You’ve earned it.”

  I walked back into the auditorium and found Myra standing in the same place.

  “Is Robin around?”

  She fixed me with a fed-up look.

  “Why would Robin be around?”

  “We’re back in Illinois. The headquarters are right down the road.”

  “I haven’t seen her. But most of the staff is back at the hotel.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Take it easy, all right, cowboy? Try to relax a little.”

  I asked at the hotel desk. The campaign had a staff room down the hall off the second-floor ballroom. Robin was sitting around a table with a group of volu
nteers when I found her. She saw me as I came through the door.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said to the stunned volunteers and met me at the door. We stepped into the deserted ballroom and then, for a long moment, there was nothing we could say to each other.

  “You don’t look so good,” Robin said.

  “I want to ask you something.”

  “Cliff. Now is not the time. I’ve got—”

  I slapped the wall. “Listen to me. I just want to ask you something. Why did you do it?”

  “Why did I do what?”

  I couldn’t say the words. “Why did you say what you did in the car?”

  She looked at me in disbelief.

  “I thought I knew,” I said. “But I thought I knew all kinds of things and I just wanted to hear you say it. It doesn’t matter. It can’t change anything. Just tell me the truth.”

  Robin leaned back against the wall, panels of red velvet wallpaper with thin strips of bronzed mirror between them, all beneath a domed ceiling, a false sky. She stared at one of the glittering, tiered chandeliers and blinked.

  “Please don’t tell me this was just about us. Please don’t tell me it was just revenge. Please don’t tell me you were just getting even.”

  “Just tell me.”

  She stared at the chandelier, her skin pale, her round mouth pursed. I saw her as if I hadn’t seen her in years, the tangle of hair, the luminous eyes, the soft hollow at the base of her throat, the long legs and skinny arms. I thought of all the dolls waved at Crane. Our children.

  “Is that why you wrote the story? Because you thought I was lying?”

  “I wrote the story because I thought it was the truth. Because I thought I would never be sure about anything if I didn’t. Not with you, not with him. Not even with myself.”

  “Oh, Cliff. You were never sure of anything. That’s just you.”

  “That’s not true. It’s unfair.”

  “Cliff.”

  “I was sure about you.”

  She slumped against the wall in one of the rushes of vulnerability that so often came before her anger.