America America (28 page)

He’s a hero, she decides. Takes his strength and gives it to the country. Those strong arms and that voice and that mind that turns her around on a string sometimes like the mobile in the dentist’s office.
He hasn’t said this to anybody else yet.
That’s what she decides. And he looked at her face right after he finished saying it.
Her
face. He turned to her as he sat on the bed. She remembers that so clearly—because this was really something he should have been saying standing up, that’s how good it was—and something changed in his face as he knotted his tie and jerked it straight in the collar. Was it her own look? She’s tried and tried, but for the life of her she can’t remember whether she smiled.

III

S
OME TIME AGO,
not long after September 11th, I decided to look up JoEllen Charney’s parents. I can’t explain the relation between these two things, other than that the first one finally motivated me to do some of what I’d been meaning to do for years. On an errand in Buffalo I stopped out to see them—Eunice and George Charney. The house was in the scrub country between Albion and the Niagara River. A small, vinyl-sided ranch with the cab of a big rig parked out front and a couple of pieces of earth-moving equipment sitting in the tall grass of the side yard. I’d called in advance. Told them I’d known their daughter.

They received me in the backyard, where George was whittling duck decoys from hunks of cedar that had been cut with a chain saw. We sat down at a set of plastic lawn chairs around a rusted table. They both seemed to be doing okay for their age, and when Eunice rose to shake my hand I had a brief glimpse of a certain, inviting melancholy in her eyes—the same, down-rounded lids that had been made briefly infamous thirty years before. George had the puffed cheeks and grayed skin that you see after a life of beer and cigarettes, but there was still something hard in his features. He turned and spit onto the lawn.

“Now, tell us how you knew JoEllen,” Eunice said.

“Let me explain myself,” I answered, “just so I’m clear. I used to work for Liam Metarey.”

George Charney put down his whittling.

“But you have to understand, I’m not coming on anyone’s behalf. That job ended thirty years ago. And I haven’t seen Senator Bonwiller in almost as long.”

“He’s not a senator anymore.”

“No, he’s not, Mr. Charney. You’re right.”

“He’s just a son-of-a-bitch lawyer.”

When he stood, he knocked one of the cedar decoys off the table. He limped across to the side yard where the machinery was and picked up a whittled cane, whose handle was also carved into a duck’s head. He stood there leaning on it, looking back at us, the carved eyes staring as blackly as his own.

“Go on, young man,” said Mrs. Charney.

“I wanted to come out because I have children now,” I said. “A daughter myself.
Daughters
, I mean. Mostly grown. And I guess I didn’t want to do anything but give you my condolences. I know it’s late. That’s all I wanted to do, Mr. and Mrs. Charney. Say I’m sorry for what happened.”

“Thank you,” said Eunice. She reached across the table and took my two hands in hers for a moment.

“Your pop’s Grange Sifter, ain’t he?” her husband said from across the lawn.

“Yes, sir.”

He took a couple of steps back toward us. I could see now that he wasn’t doing as well as I’d thought. One leg lagged behind and he had to swing it around the cane. He was breathing hard. “Your pop and I worked together on the Corney Flood Dam.”

“Corney Dam,” I said. “I remember it. Must have been 1968.”

“’Sixty-nine. Right before I did the leg.” He yanked out the chair and sat again. “Never could get the control gate on the sluice to close right. Still not sure it wouldn’t lie down like a drunk dog if a whole lot of water hit it.”

“We think about JoEll all the time,” said Eunice.

“I know you must.”

“She’s in heaven, we believe.”

“I do know that.”

She looked into my eyes. “Is there anything you meant to tell us?”

I glanced over toward the back of the yard, where on the other side of the machinery a thin woods started. Then back at her. “No, ma’am. Just that I’m sorry. I wanted to pay my respects. Long overdue.”

“Then, thank you.”

“Well,” I said. “I don’t mean to take up your day.”

“I liked your old man,” George said. “Everybody did.”

“Thank you. He spends his time at the new community center these days. Plays cards and that kind of thing. He’s okay with it.”

“Oh, yeah. They’re all over the state now. Wouldn’t mind one ourselves.”

“Used to be the Y. Now it’s called Bright Horizons.” I laughed. “Outside Saline.”

“Is that right? Built that place, too, for God sakes. If I remember. Had to bring in beams to get the roof up to code. Thirty-six-foot long.”

“I’ve seen those beams. They’re big.”

“Big is right.”

“Thank you for coming by, Mr. Sifter,” said Eunice.

We stood then, and Mr. Charney approached us again, shaking my hand finally and then walking me slowly out around the side of the house to the car. A mongrel dog joined him, staying close to his cane. “What do you do?” he asked, as I was about to close the door.

“Newspaper business.”

“Oh,” he said. That seemed to stop him. “Where at?”

I rolled down the window. “A paper called
The Speaker-Sentinel
.”

“Don’t read much. Not around here, though, is it?”

“No, not really. South of here. Fifty miles. Islington-Steppan-Saline.”

“I didn’t build it, anyways.”

“It’s a distance.”

I started the motor.

“What do you do for them?” he asked.

“I’m the publisher.”

“The publisher.”

“Means I run it. Least at a place our size.”

“That right? Grange Sifter’s boy runs the newspaper?”

“I guess he does.”

“Ain’t that funny?”

“Ain’t it, is right,” I said.

He patted the dog, then leaned down and rested his arm on the door. “You not planning to write anything about my daughter now, are you?”

“No, sir. That’s not why I came out.”

He looked in at me and I saw his eyes run over the seats, the dashboard, my jacket hanging by the rear window. Then he stood up and said, “Of course I’m sad about JoEllen. If that’s what you want to know.” With a bit of effort, he crossed his arms and leaned back on his hips the way my father and all his workmates used to do, to ease the effort of standing. “I got no idea why you come,” he said, “but I’m sad for my daughter every day, if that’s what you want to know. I miss her all the time.” He leaned in closer again. “You think it goes away?”

“No, sir. I don’t imagine it does.”

“Son of a bitch killed her. Me and Eunice know that. Is that what you’re asking yourself? Why don’t her father do something about it? Is that what?”

“No, sir. That’s not it at all.”

“That’s what everybody wants to know. But what the hell are we going to do about it?” he said. “What the hell are me and Eunice going to do about it now?”

“W
HAT WAS HE DOING
on the tractor?”

“What was who doing?”

“Liam Metarey. You said he went out on the Ferguson. That afternoon in the snow. When Henry Bonwiller was up in his office. Sleeping off his drunk.”

“I have no real evidence he was drunk.”

“Sure was drinking a lot of coffee.”

“You listen very carefully.”

“I’m a reporter,” she said, smiling. But she kept her eyes on me. “And the tractor?”

“How should I know?” I said. “It’s a huge piece of land.”

“But you told me he went out on the tractor. You noticed it and you told me. Is it normal for a man to take a tractor into the woods in a snowstorm?”

“I just saw him head up the driveway. I don’t know if he went into the woods. He could have been heading into town, for all I know.”

She raised her eyebrows. “On a tractor?”

T
HE NEXT DAY,
just as Henry Bonwiller predicted, Muskie began his slide. His swift and famous descent into oblivion. And a week after that, in New Hampshire, he finished fourth. Even McGovern beat him. And Henry Bonwiller, who in January had been down by seventeen points, finished first. I heard that news, too, in the commons lounge at Dunleavy. This time Mr. Clayliss shook his head.

The week after that, in Florida, he very nearly did it again. He’d been given almost no chance at all there, but it took a last-minute push by Governor George Wallace—governor of the state next door—to eke out the win. By less than a point, as it turned out. And Wallace had spent nearly all his cash doing it. On top of that, Henry Bonwiller beat him soundly in the counties around Miami and Palm Beach, where the real money was. That Monday, phone calls went out across the area. Mr. Metarey got him on the cover of
Life
—in overalls and work gloves, sitting on a bright green sawhorse that I’d painted that morning and then roughed up with engine oil and a chain. McGovern was starting to make his case by then—he was known around Aberdeen West as a dogged campaigner—but his opposition to the war wasn’t yet as well known as the Senator’s and he finished well down in the pack. There was talk of him throwing his support to Bonwiller in exchange for the vice presidency. But I don’t think the idea went far. “Man’s got the charisma of a turnip,” I heard Senator Bonwiller say to Liam Metarey one afternoon as I was leaving the library. Humphrey, for his own part, ran dismally in Florida. There was talk now of Muskie finally giving up, as well.

Back in Saline, once more, hotel rooms were not to be had. The campaign had rented every bed again at the Excelsior, and at all the roadhouses between there and Steppan, too, but now there was no stopping the number of political operatives who wanted to join us. The campaign hired a man just to interview them and furnished a room in the basement just for him to do it. Even on the weekends, there might have been seventy-five aides on the estate, and those of us who had been around longer than a few weeks began to exchange nods in the halls.

On the 21st of March, in Illinois, he won again, this time overwhelmingly: 780,000 votes. No one else even came close. The general election was a little over seven months away. Planes were landing at Aberdeen West from Washington and New York and Boston and Albany, and now the talk had shifted to a new subject: how to beat the president in the fall.

A
ND THEN WHAT HAPPENS
to her? What does this extraordinary moment with a United States senator finally do for her? The next morning she feels a little pit in her gut. Nothing big. Maybe just needs a little breakfast; that’s all. Coffee. But afterward it’s still there and as she sets the cup on the counter to dry, she feels it again. This time a little stronger. A tiny little stone. Resentment. That’s what it is. Clear as day. What’s the matter with her? She’s tried to help people all her life, and so has he. And what could be wrong with that? But it’s there. She feels it again as she waits for him that night at The Pines, watching TV until almost eleven-thirty, when she finally hears his tires on the gravel. That’s what it is now: a cold little stone low in her belly. She hopes it won’t show in her face. When she hears the car door close she smiles at the mirror and goes to answer the short-short-long knock.