America America (16 page)

“He looks worried,” I said.

“Christ,” he answered, “it’s the weekend. Isn’t one injured animal enough?”

“Sir?”

“Did he say what he wanted?”

“He didn’t even say hello.”

He looked startled. “Walk him,” he said, handing me Breighton’s reins. He glanced up at the house. “Henry Bonwiller would say hello to the hangman.”

I think I was aware through these years—and by that, I mean the time from the summer I first began working on the Metarey estate until the fall I went away to college—I think I was aware through these years that they were already apart from my true life, from my
own
life; and it’s because of this, I think, that they have become the substance of my most formidable memories. That must be why I still see the events of that time with such clarity, when otherwise my childhood is just a wash of ordinary sensations: wet ball fields, the ringing of school bells, the smell of lime on my father’s clothes.

Liam Metarey and the Senator spent the whole morning in the downstairs study. I could see them talking at a table. At one point I looked in from the corral and saw the Senator stumble as he rose from his seat, and then Mr. Metarey take his elbow. The snow was getting heavier and I’d had to shovel a track for Breighton, who was skittish from his injury, before I could lead him back to the stall at lunchtime. By then, Mr. Metarey and the Senator were in the upstairs library.

That afternoon I was summoned there to build a fire, and when I came in with an armful of walnut their conversation stopped. They watched me as I set up the wood. On the table in front of them sat a pot of coffee, and in the few minutes I was in the room Senator Bonwiller finished a full cup and poured himself another. Then they both sat back against the cushions. By that point in my work at the Metareys’, my presence was rarely noticed, but now the two of them were clearly waiting for me to leave. The snow was thick outside and the room had taken on the stony chill that the house emanated in the darkest days of winter. When I stepped back into the hallway and closed the door, I heard their conversation begin again.

A few minutes later, I saw Liam Metarey go outside to the work barn and emerge driving the Ferguson. He headed up the driveway on it, vanishing into the falling snow.

That evening, near five, which was my hour to go home, he found me in the toolshed. “We need a driver into Buffalo,” he said. “An errand.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m sorry if it means you’ll miss dinner at home—but Gil’s out and there’s no one else to do it. We’ll eat in Buffalo, all of us together. You can give your parents a call from inside. But hurry,” he said, glancing at his watch, “we’re late. And big snow’s coming tonight. We’ll take the Senator’s car.” Then he looked at me. “There’s trouble,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

I don’t know, and I suppose I never will know, exactly what Liam Metarey thought of me, or what I was to him. But he looked at me openly now. “We couldn’t be in a bigger mess, actually.”

“I saw the headline,” I said.

He looked startled. “Which headline?”

“The grand jury,” I said. I considered whether I might have overstepped. Finally I added, “Anodyne Energy.”

“Oh, that—” he said. “Well, I wish that was all we had to worry about.”

“You can count on me, sir.”

“I know,” he answered, “I know.” Then he reached across and ruffled my hair the way he did sometimes. “Let’s go, I suppose. I’m sorry.”

Of course he didn’t tell me what the errand was, and of course I didn’t expect to know—it was only years afterward that I pieced together what might have happened. I called home and a moment later came outside to find the two of them already waiting in the idling Cadillac. It was almost dark now and all the porch and garage lamps were off, but the car’s inside light was on, and I recall clearly how they looked as I hurried from the house. Henry Bonwiller gestured as he spoke from the backseat and Liam Metarey nodded as he listened from the front, both of them illuminated so starkly that they seemed to glow. The driver’s door was already open, and I quickly took my place at the wheel. I didn’t take any kind of close look at the car; there was no reason to. A thin layer of melting snow whitened the carpet by Mr. Metarey’s shoes, and when I glanced to the back I saw snow there, too, on the floor and on the ridge of the seat, but I didn’t bother to think about how it might have gotten in there. “I can sweep the snow out,” I said.

“No, no,” said Liam Metarey. “Don’t bother with it.”

“There’s no time,” said the Senator. “Just drive.”

The car was warm. With the sides of his shoes, Mr. Metarey was brushing the snow to the edge of the carpet, and I could hear the Senator in the backseat doing the same. As I rounded the curve by the house the front wheels slid in a drift, but I turned the wheel toward the skid and we straightened. I fixed my concentration on the road.

“Rough weather,” said the Senator.

“We should be thanking God for that, Henry,” Liam Metarey said sharply. “And thanking God,” he added in a gentler tone, “that we have someone like Corey to drive in it.”

The air had turned noticeably colder in the afternoon. There were several inches of snow on the pavement now, but it was dry and the car’s heavy tires threw it out of the way. I made a point of driving particularly cautiously, but if they asked for speed I was ready to supply it. It occurred to me that they might need to resume whatever conversation they’d been having that day, so I turned on the radio, which was set to a jazz station, and let them see that I was listening to it. The sun was almost down. We turned from the gravel traffic circle of the courtyard onto the long driveway, which ran through the rows of sycamores and the dense woods of oak and Scotch pine. Here the road passed nearly into its full nighttime dark, and the snow lay thinner where it was shielded beneath the limbs.

As we passed out of the lane where the sycamores met overhead, into the longer, open stretch of lower trees, Liam Metarey leaned forward, turned off the radio, and said, “Look at that—a hawk.” He pointed out my corner of the windshield toward the sky. “Hunting on our land. That’s got to be a sign.”

“A redtail,” Senator Bonwiller said quickly from the backseat. “That’s an auspicious omen.”

“Do you see him, Corey?” said Liam Metarey, leaning low on the seat toward me and craning his neck so that he could point at the sky through my window. His head nearly rested on the steering wheel. “Do you see his regal tail?”

We were in the middle of the forest now. “I can’t look, sir, at the moment.”

“Spectacular,” said the Senator. “Look at him.”

“I can’t yet, sir. But I’ve seen them before. I’ve lived here all my life.” Instantly I regretted mentioning anything about myself, even a fact so small—not because of modesty, but because I knew that Henry Bonwiller wasn’t the least bit interested. In order to move the subject back to the hawk, I said, “I’ll see him at the turn, sir.”

“He’ll be gone by then,” said the Senator. “It’s nearly dark. Take a good look at him now, son.”

I slowed the car.

“Don’t stop,” he said. “For Christ’s sake. He’s right overhead in the gap. Just open the damn window and put your head out.”

I lowered the glass. It was snowing heavily here at the break, but I leaned out and looked up toward the sky. In order to please the two of them, I made a show of getting my head most of the way out of the opening. Big flakes landed in my eyes. I saw no hawk, only the froth of descending white against the blackening clouds.

It’s impossible to reconstruct everything that happened next. I remember feeling stuck. I think my arm must have been pinned against the top of the door. I lifted my hips to free it.

I heard Mr. Metarey say, “Sorry, son.”

That’s when the steering wheel jerked in my hand. We left the road and in an instant were sliding down the steep embankment. I felt Mr. Metarey’s strong arms pulling me in, then the violent bounce at the bottom of the gulley. We skidded on the riprap and pushed sideways through a drift, then ran headlong across open ground, plowing snow over the hood, until we hit.

A sledgehammer. Followed by silence. Then hissing. I opened my eyes. A good-sized oak rose from the corner of the hood. Mr. Metarey reached and switched off the engine. The hissing stopped and we were surrounded by an eerie quiet until after a moment I heard the almost imperceptible pattering of snow on the roof. He was rubbing his forehead.

His voice sounded strained. “Well, Corey,” he said, “I guess we’re not going to see that hawk tonight, after all.” Then he began brushing at the snow around his feet again.

“Ah, but he was something,” said Senator Bonwiller, in an almost jovial tone. “Believe me.”

“Are you all right, Senator?” I said, turning to the backseat.

“I sure hope so, boy.”

He laughed at that, and he seemed to be fine as he unstrapped his seat belt and climbed out. He stood at the tree inspecting the damage. “Both left quarter panels,” he said. “Front one just at the point.”

Mr. Metarey got out, too, and ran his hand over it. “Both’ll have to be replaced,” he said. “Simple. Done by tomorrow night, Senator.”

When I finally joined them outside, Henry Bonwiller greeted me with a slap on the back. “That was a fine piece of driving, there,” he said. “Both of you.”

That’s what he said. I remember it.

“I’m sorry, sir. Are you all right, Senator? I’m sorry, Mr. Metarey. I can run back to the house. Is everyone okay? I’ll run back and get another car. I’ll be right back. I can get someone. I’m sorry, Senator. I’m very sorry.”

“No,” said Liam Metarey, looking up the road to the north. “Wait here with us.”

“Should I get the Chrysler?”

And as though to answer me, at that very moment a pair of lights appeared at the north entrance. They flickered in the distance, then swung around and steadied toward us. At the time, I thought it was our great good luck.

“You’ll wait here with us, boy,” said Henry Bonwiller.

We had all turned to look now. It might have been a dream. The distant headlamps zigzagging through the black woods, causing long tracks of luxuriously swirling flakes to materialize out of the dark. The beams grew brighter, moving slowly around the curves, and when they rounded the last bend I saw that they belonged to the maintenance station wagon. Gil McKinstrey was at the wheel. I scrambled up the embankment, my legs plunging in the drifts.

“Calm there, Corey,” Liam Metarey called. “Calm is ninety percent in a situation like this.”

The car slowed and Gil shouted out the window, “Anyone hurt?” He held a hurricane lantern.

“Nothing a hot toddy wouldn’t cure,” the Senator bellowed back.

“I’ll see if we have one around then. Yes, sir.”

Then, before the station wagon had even stopped, the back doors swung open and three men emerged clutching rescue equipment. Oh, how new I was to that world, and how naïve. It was all strangely incomprehensible until they were most of the way down the embankment and I finally understood what was happening: it wasn’t rescue equipment at all—it was camera equipment. They were press photographers, climbing down with their gear.

I’d seen them before, I realized, at the Metarey parties. One was from
The Sentinel
, I think, and one from the
Courier-Express
, and one was just a man they hired for handshake shots. Henry Bonwiller clapped me on the back, and although he was dressed in his usual dark suit and suspenders, he hopped right up and sat on the wet front of the hood. And after that, there seemed to be nothing but frivolity. He took off his coat and offered it to me—my pants were covered to the knees with snow—and then he gestured with his broad hand for me to sit next to him. I did, and he placed the coat over my shoulders. The
Sentinel
photographer, who had already set up his tripod, looked down into his camera and began to count backwards for the flash.

Over the years I’ve thought about this incident, probably more often than about any other bit of this story, and I still can’t say if what Mr. Metarey and the Senator did was an intelligent gamble or merely the product of ambition, delusion, and the frenzied velocity of the campaign. In a drawer of my desk at home, I still have a framed picture of the Senator and me sitting on the hood of that car. It’s the original of the print that I believe they were keeping in case they needed it to run somewhere. I suppose they had their reasons to do it that way—it would have provided what they needed, if it ever came to that. And they could have spread it a lot farther than the
Courier-Express
, if they’d had to. But they never did.

I’ve never known another politician, and have never again in my life come so close to a man of history like Senator Bonwiller, but at the time I must have supposed that such experiences would one day become common for me. I took every incident as a fable, every milestone as a fortuitous lesson on how to act in this new and public world. The Senator sat on the hood with me, and although he’d begun to look uncomfortable, he started to tell jokes then, anyway, the way he often did when photographers were around. In front of us they clomped around in the deep snow, lugging their tripods. I must say, not one of his stories struck me as funny, but I remember that I was laughing anyway—loudly enough that he would hear. It shames me to admit that now. In retrospect I’d say that I didn’t like him much, even then, but I suppose in those days there was nothing I wouldn’t do for him. Or for Mr. Metarey, either. Flashes were going off now in quick succession. When the Senator indicated that he wanted another shot from a wider angle, the men picked up their gear and lugged it farther into the woods. I rose from the hood and leaned against the tree on which I’d just ruined his car, smiling for the cameras.

As for Liam Metarey, something bleak had entered him and suddenly he seemed to want nothing to do with it anymore. He walked up to stand behind the tripods in the dark. Each time a flash faded away, I could see him leaning against a tree, near Gil McKinstrey, who was watching us from alongside the station wagon.

“That’s plenty of pictures,” Mr. Metarey finally called down to us. “Let’s go now, before any tears are shed.”