He turns and looks at me as I put my hand on the doorknob and push the door inward. Our eyes study each other. I can’t tell what he’s thinking. In his gaze there’s just frenzy.
My first impression is of some kind of overly sweet odor. Some kind of air freshener spritzed to a toxic level. All the windows are open, too. It’s actually cold in here. Autumn cold; even a hint of winter. The odor and the open windows means he’s trying to cover a smell. Given his crazed alarm, given the streak of blood on his shirt I saw, given his remark that somebody set him up, I know now what I’ll find on the back porch.
My stomach clenches again and despite the cold I know there’s light sweat on my face.
Oh, yes, sometimes you can walk on the dark side and keep your candidate from self-destructing. That is, if what you’re covering up falls within certain parameters.
I have the feeling that I’m about to see a dead woman. I also have the feeling — knowing now that he has probably been lying to me all along — that I know who she is.
Or was.
One
Fifteen days earlier I’d sat on a folding chair in a high school gymnasium watching Senator Logan conduct a town hall meeting. Given the state of the economy, mixed-to-racist feelings about the president of the United States and the leader of Logan’s party and the prospect of unions being busted, not to mention gay marriage, there was plenty to discuss.
The gym was decorated with yellow and black crepe paper and large papier-mâché images of a lion’s head. Apparently there had been a pep rally here earlier today. Hard not to think of your own pep rallies, the slap of basketballs on the shining floor, the feel in your arms of your first love knowing that all too soon she’d break your heart; and how small it would all seem when you visited it a few years later.
Logan was in his usual casual attire, the chambray shirt and jeans plus a gray tweed jacket. He addressed the crowd of perhaps a hundred through a stand-up microphone. The meeting had started promptly at seven and now, at eight, showed no signs of calming down.
Even though some of the questions were pointed, none had been personal or demeaning. The entire country was pissed off and generally with good reason. The citizens of Linton, Illinois, population 31,600, had every right to be just as pissed, especially given the fact that within the past two years three of its manufacturing plants had been relocated in the South.
But then came the inevitable.
If this was a movie role you’d cast somebody burly and menacing. He’d have wiry black hair and need a shave and maybe his teeth would be bad. His eyes and his voice would belong on the violent wing of the nearest psych ward.
You would not cast a maybe one-hundred-and-thirty-pound, fortyish man with thick glasses and a faint lisp as your choice to drop the birther bomb. He wore a short-sleeved shirt buttoned to the neck and tan pants that reached to his ribcage. He was a parody of a type and when he stood up my first response was to feel sorry for him. You could imagine the bullying he’d had to endure in school and the invisible sort of life he’d had as an adult.
But then he started waving a bunch of papers and that was never a good sign. People who wave papers announce upfront that they are going to say something crazy. George Bush was behind 9/11 had become a popular myth once again. A lot of papers had been waved at Robert about that.
‘Senator Logan, my name is Stan Candiss and I have proof here that your president is a Communist spy.’
Before Mr Candiss had grabbed my attention the gymnasium had been inspiring some high school memories of my own. I’d been thinking about the girls I’d taken to my junior and senior proms respectively, wondering what they were doing now, wondering if they ever wondered about me. But when Mr Candiss had stood up I’d sensed — despite my feeling a little sorry for him — that we were about to witness the inevitable moment in all town hall meetings: the conspiracy accusation.
Mr Candiss was apparently a known commodity locally.
‘God damn it, Stan; sit down and shut up.’
‘We’re trying to have a serious discussion here, Stan.’
‘Somebody should throw him out.’
Mr Candiss, it would seem, was not a beloved figure. Which did not stop him from continuing to wave his papers from his position in the last row of folding chairs — or from saying, ‘Whether or not the senator wants to hear about it, there is a website that proves that after the president was born in Kenya he lived for eight years in Moscow. If any of you have ever seen The Manchurian Candidate, you know how communists can turn human beings into assassins. This website documents how the president — our president — is going to turn our entire arsenal of nuclear bombs on our own country.’
Though there were a few giggles, the general response was cursing, grumbling and even threatening.
Logan handled it calmly. ‘I’ve actually seen that website. I believe you called my office in Washington a while back, Mr Candiss. You actually made our receptionist so curious that after she hung up she went right to the site and then started showing it to the staff. We were very intrigued.’
This time there was laughter. It wasn’t hard to imagine congressional staffers chortling over some whacked-out crap about the president nuking America.
‘These people laugh because they’re ignorant. Are you ignorant, too, Senator Logan?’
Candiss went back to waving his papers but was forced to stop when a huge man in a Packers sweatshirt and jeans reared up from his seat and stalked to the last row of folding chairs. Most of the people had swiveled around to watch the action.
You can never tell how something like this will play out. Harsh words can lead to violence. There is always the chance, given the fact that the NRA wants to arm everybody over the age of three, that a gun might appear.
‘We need to stay calm,’ Logan said. ‘Sir, if you’ll take your seat again—’
Logan’s local people had hired two off-duty police officers to handle security. They now appeared from their posts at the respective doors of the gym. They moved quickly toward Mr Candiss. They would stand next to him in case the big man tried to charge him. Then came the surprise.
‘Stan, I stick up for you all the time at the lumberyard,’ the man said, and there was real sympathy in his tone, ‘and I even listen to all your stupid stories at lunchtime. But we’re trying to have a serious talk here so please just sit the hell down and shut the hell up.’
Just about everybody in the gym applauded. Mr Candiss knew enough to look embarrassed and sit down. As the Packers man made his way back to his seat other men stuck their hands out to shake his. I admired the way he’d handled the situation. I’d have shaken his hand, too.
Logan had a few awkward moments but finally assured everybody that he was still interested in taking questions. His enthusiasm for the task only reminded me and his staffers of how our fortunes had changed in the last twenty-three days. The other side had dumped more than eleven million dollars in negative TV advertising into the state and we had started to feel its effects. For the previous two months we had managed to stay two-to-three points ahead, but now our internal polling showed that we were in a tie. Our opponent was a man named Charlie Shay, a folksy multimillionaire insurance executive who had once been considered too conservative for even this election cycle. Insurance people were not beloved in this country. But his bullshit Huckleberry Finn persona, created by a public relations team in Washington, was starting to take hold. There was one especially unctuous commercial where he was sitting with his grandson at sunset along a stream where he pretends to be fishing while handing out numerous lies about Logan. The closest Shay had ever gotten to fishing was opening a can of tuna.