If Men Were Angels
Page 32
He fell as he falls forever, hitting the ground, knees bent, curled on the concrete like an infant, head down, and then all of him buried by the crowd.
You know he died an hour later. You know the doctors tried everything, but the damage to his heart and lungs was too severe. They had him on the table for forty minutes, but he was gone from the moment the second shot hit his heart.
You know the man who shot him was Theodore Roosevelt Gaines, Teddy Gaines to his friends in Jacksonville. He had followed Crane for three days without getting close. That morning he had called his wife, who did not understand what he was doing, and told her he was out of money and would be coming home Friday. Crane was shot on Thursday. You could hear Teddy Gaines screaming about Jesus down the hallway of the Hennepin County Courthouse the day he was arraigned.
So I heard on the radio. I had been sent away by then. When Crane fell I fought my way back to the bus and called my office, like every reporter, and when our bus driver refused to move, Myra, Stuart, and I commandeered a cab and followed the limousine to the hospital, where we didn’t have long to wait before the ashen doctor came out and passed on the news. They say Angela was by his side and would not let go of his hand at the end. This is the thing that stares up at me now in the gathering dark. The thought she would not let go.
I stayed with the story and did my job. I wrote two quick takes that flashed out on the wire, one while we waited at the hospital, the other after the doctors pronounced him dead. I did an update an hour later. Work was all I had and I clung to it fiercely, but by early afternoon, Cannon had flown in four reporters, and the company got me as far away from Thomas Crane’s death as they could.
So I came back to Washington a day earlier than expected. No one knew quite what to do with me. I sat around the office pretending to work on a retrospective of the campaign until after the funeral. You know the funeral, but I will tell you a secret: I was there. I stood on the corner of Pennsylvania and Ninth and watched the caisson travel toward Arlington Cemetery. I wore sunglasses because the day was bright, but I wasn’t trying to hide. No one recognized me. I heard the cannon shots rippling across the Potomac and then I went inside and watched them lay him to rest. We are never together in this country anymore except when we celebrate or mourn. For the next few days I listened to those who had scorned him express their public sorrow, and it brought a faint smile. In the end he held us together as he hoped he would.
I took three weeks’ vacation after the funeral and it turned into a year’s sabbatical. Cannon Newspapers was only too glad to pay me to disappear. I signed a contract to write a book about how I broke the story that ended a presidential campaign. The publisher said he wanted “something like Woodward and Bernstein.” But I have been in Washington long enough to know that Woodward and Bernstein are really Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. I have written this instead.
You may have seen Robin in the last month. Since she went to work for the Urban Coalition she shows up on television now and then, and sometimes I catch a glimpse of her. She has a new, shorter haircut, but other than that she looks and sounds the same. She looks good. You can tell she cares.
I don’t know what I would have said if I had caught up with her that last morning. I suppose I would have asked her to give me another chance. It was a terrible, impossible price to pay, but I am glad, at least, we were spared that.
When I started the book I drove to New Hampshire to remember what it had been like, and then I found myself traveling to so many of the places we had been on the campaign. I stared at empty fields and deserted halls and vacant parks and tried to fill them with the crowd that still lives in the back of my head. The day of the president’s second inaugural, I was in Iowa standing in an unheated barn at the Des Moines fairgrounds, remembering the plaid shirts on the band. I drove through a dozen states, but mostly I drifted west and north in a slow spiral that has finally taken me to the place I was headed all along.
X.
THE LIGHT has fallen now across Berthold and the snow blows only along the ground. Stars race through patchwork clouds. I open the car door and step onto the road, the gravel hard under my feet, the air stinging my lungs. All the familiar ghosts have faded. The cornstalks are the shattered remains of a beaten army. I wade through the dead grass in the ditch out into the field behind the Crane home, stumbling over the frozen ground until I stand across from the small town.
The houses are disappearing in the darkness, their canted roofs cardboard cutouts against the sky. As I stand there yellow squares of light bloom in the darkness and people move within the light. I feel a melted snowflake slide down my back like a single finger running along my spine.
I remember standing outside of Havre in the same quiet, on the same kind of night. I know the stillness, the wind-born smell of wood smoke, the feeling Thomas Crane must have had when he contemplated his hometown in the early morning light.
His life was more of a trap than most, and at times this odd hatful of houses huddled against the cold must have felt heavy around his heart. But I want to believe there was more than that. He must have, in all the days he spent here, once stood where I am standing, must have confronted this town so fragile against the immense emptiness. He must have felt an inescapable tenderness at the stubborn survival of this place, his home, a place he probably already knew he had to leave behind.
I can see him standing in the open and looking back, feeling the weight of an idealized and impossible expectation, but believing he can live with it, persevere, believing he can trim the role to fit himself. Maybe this Thomas Crane is no more real than any of the others, but I hang on to him. I choose to believe he became the man he became out of love. I choose to believe this because if I don’t I have nothing.
The town is so small that when I hold my hand out at the end of my arm I can almost erase it; only the cemetery and the moonlit silver grain elevator escape the darkness of my extended fingers. Yet I feel it there, the lonely, longing heartbeat at the center of a continent. The place where the road begins.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their support and encouragement, I would like to thank Jenny Bent, David Everett, Patty Edmonds, Jim Lipsiea, Betty Karaim, Robert Wilson, and, especially, Karen Brown.
For their close reading and suggestions for improving this manuscript, Adam Goodheart, Laura Sands, Connie McGovern, and Starling Lawrence.
For space and time to work, The Sanskriti Kendra Foundation of New Delhi, India.
For all of the above, Aurelie Sheehan.
About If Men Were Angels
In the heat of a presidential race a dark-horse candidate emerges who seems to answer the hopes of the American voters. Is he, perhaps, too good to be true?
The tumultuous presidential bandwagon of Thomas Crane, a charismatic but elusive senator from the Midwest, presents reporter Cliff O’Connell with a career-making opportunity that slowly becomes a nightmare. In combing the past for the real Thomas Crane, O’Connell becomes the keeper of a secret that he knows should remain buried forever.
O’Connell’s former lover, Robin Winters, now works for the Crane campaign, and that relationship reignites at the same time that the campaign, against all odds, takes off. O’Connell also discovers an unexpected rapport with Crane, who shares his love of history and a humble, small-town background.
Digging into the part of Crane’s past that refuses to make sense, uncovering layers of truth with a growing sense of unease, O’Connell is caught in a brutal triangle, torn between personal and political passions and his commitment to the truth. His discovery and what he does about it have cataclysmic and unexpected results for himself, Robin, Crane, and a nation.
This is an urgent, resonant work about love, hope, and loss. Rooted in the realities of a brawling campaign, but proceeding along the lines of an elegant and remorseless legal thriller, it is the novel about politics that Scott Turow might have written.
Copyright © 1999 by Reed Karaim
All rights reserve
d
First Edition
While some historical events depicted in this novel are factual, as are certain locales and persons and organizations in the public view, this is a work of fiction whose characters and their actions are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organizations, or events is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author, nor does the author pretend to have private information about such individuals.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows
Karaim, Reed.
If men were angels / Reed Karaim.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-393-33322-0
ISBN: 978-0-393-60959-2 (e-book)
I. Title.
PS3561.A5745I36 1999
813'.54—dc21
98–51838
CIP
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