The Candidate (18 page)

Mike stood his ground, speaking softly. Suddenly the air inside the car felt full of electricity, alive and fizzing between them. Mike knew he was on dangerous territory but pressed on. “Is that why the General is in Livingston? He went too far?”

Federico stared straight ahead. For a long time he did not speak a word, but his eyes widened, as if he saw events long lost in time. A bead of sweat appeared on his forehead and trickled down his brow like a tear. “I tell you one thing more,” he said, his teeth gritted and his jaw almost locked. “We did not go far enough.”

They were the last words Federico spoke. For the remaining four hours to the airport, Mike stared out at the passing mountains, looking at their green folded shoulders shrug themselves into a cloud-strewn sky. They looked peaceful, beautiful, havens of life, dotted with tiny fields. But Mike only heard Federico’s words describe the blood that ran down those same valleys just a few decades ago.

* * *

THE TWO students froze as Dee marched by in the chaotic mess that was now Hodges’ Manchester headquarters. The boy, whose tousled blond hair suddenly reminded her of her younger brother, tickled the girl and nearly caused her to drop a sheaf of papers she was carrying. Dee’s sudden appearance was like the arrival of a stern teacher in a classroom out of control.

“Get a room,” Dee snapped as she walked by. But she could not resist a smile too. God, she envied their carefree youth.

She went into her office and slammed the door shut. She wore the same clothes for two days straight and was sure she smelled like she’d worn them for a week. Not that anyone would dare mention it. She glanced at her watch. It was past midnight and still the room outside was as busy as Grand Central at rush hour. The televisions blared the cable news shows, students placed fund-raising calls to the West Coast and abroad; plans were drawn up and arrangements made. There was just 48 hours to go now. No time to sleep. No time to waste.

She thought again of the two young students outside and remembered her own first campaign. She was at college in California. It was 1979 and Reagan was about to take over America. Looking back, you sensed it in the air, but she had no clue at the time. She threw everything she had into the campaign of a liberal congressman in Orange County, California. When he was swept away by the Republican tide, she was genuinely devastated. It was hard, she thought, for the first experience of a campaign to be such a loss. It was always good to taste the thrill of victory your first time. But it made her hard quickly and she was thankful for that. She sighed to herself. Had she ever really looked like one of those fresh-faced kids outside? That was more than thirty years ago.
Merde.
Still, here she was now. Ready to guide someone to the ultimate prize: the path to the White House. She could put Jack Hodges on that road. She knew she could. She just needed to win this race and then shake up this stuffy world.

A knock on the door disturbed her reverie. She looked up and shouted a “Come in.” One of the flirting students walked in. The boy. He really did look like her little brother, Beau. Or the way she remembered him three decades ago when they scrapped and fought like bobcats down at their grandfather’s farm.

“You look positively post-coital,” Dee teased.

The boy blushed a deep red as he handed over a folder. It was the latest internal polling. She grabbed the sheath of papers, scanned the headline figures and plunged into the methodology and the detail. She drank in the lists of numbers and figures like it was spring water and she was lost in the desert.

Hodges was neck and neck with Stanton in New Hampshire. He was at 31 points to her 33, but with a margin of error up to four points. And he trended in the right direction. Independents broke to him by six points over the past few weeks. He was strongest among the young and students, but the elderly were warming up to him too. Stanton still led there by eight points. But a week ago it was a 16-point gap. She punched her fist in the air.

“Yes!” she said and got up from behind the desk. She banished her exhaustion and winked at the student. “We’re on our way, sweetpea,” she said.

She burst out of the office and headed down a hallway to a room used as a place to catch up on some of the many lost hours of sleep they all suffered from. Hodges lay in there now, resting on a makeshift cot. He had attended a whirlwind of house parties in the Manchester suburbs and had a 7:00 a.m. breakfast rally the next morning. There was little point in going back to the hotel. Dee knocked quietly on the door and pushed it open.

“Senator,” she said. “You said to wake you when the latest numbers came through.”

The light flashed on. Hodges was lying down, still wearing his somber blue suit. But he looked as alert as normal. He had an uncanny ability to go from sleep to wakefulness in an instant. He sat straight up, stretched and held out a hand. She gave him the papers. “This is good right?” he asked, his voice calm and measured.

Dee nodded. “We are trending strong in all the right places. We’re moving into the independents and the old folks. Essentially that means we are now fighting on Stanton’s home turf. Our tanks are parked right up on her lawn.”

Hodges smiled. “You’re doing a fine job, Dee. I knew I had a chance when we got you on board.”

“It’s what I do, Jack,” Dee said.

Hodges stood up and looked down at the simple cot that he rested in. “Funny thing,” he said. “I’ve been out of the military for years but I still sleep better in one of those things than any hotel bed I’ve ever found. I guess a body just does not forget certain habits.”

“Neither do the voters,” said Dee. “What’s winning for us now is the oldest issue in the book: national security. That’s where we hit them hard. That flag-burning picture hurt Stanton real bad.”

Hodges shook his head. “You know I hated that, Dee,” he said. “That’s the sort of bullshit I never wanted near my campaign. In fact, I think we need to change tack for the last 48 hours. Try out something new. I want to talk about jobs and poverty reduction. Put some fresh policy meat on this campaign. We can brand it as a “Second New Deal for America.” Speak out for ordinary Americans a bit more, address the things they care about in times like these and quit all these tacky political games.”

Dee was silent. Hodges rested a hand on her shoulder and fixed her with a stare.

“I aim to change America, Dee. We can’t do that if this campaign stays the same,” he said. “Can you draw up a policy statement on that? We can announce it at a presser tomorrow afternoon. Get it out in time for the evening news shows.”

Dee nodded. “Of course, Senator,” she said. “But if I give you that, I want your permission to go after Stanton too. I know I can punch her out now if you allow me to keep playing my own game.”

Hodges walked over to a window at the back of a room and pulled the thin curtain aside. Outside the city lights of Manchester twinkled in a cold, clear night. The streetlights reflected off the hard-packed snow.

“You have to
win
first before you can change anything,” Dee said. “You can’t
do
anything if you lose.”

Hodges did not say anything. He just stared at the cold nightscape outside. Fuck it, Dee thought. I’m gonna take that as a yes.

* * *

“YOU PALE bastard. I thought at least you’d get a tan!”

Mike stood in the doorway of Dee’s hotel room and still clutched his bags. He took a taxi straight from the airport and his brain felt fried from the drive with Federico, the jet lag and the lump on the back of his head. But Dee’s raucous laugh and tight embrace brought him back. It was good to be here. Good to be back where the campaign was.

“No time for sun-bathing,” he said. “I was too busy getting my ass kicked.”

Dee winced sympathetically and pushed him down to sit on the bed. She positioned herself behind him and whistled through her teeth.

“Damn, Mike. You should have got this stitched,” she said running a finger over the cut and lump, matted with strands of bloodied hair. She’d seen worse, mainly after Louisiana bar fights, but there was no doubt it was a nasty blow. Whoever dealt it was not shy about what they were doing. “You sure it was linked to this General Carillo?” she asked.

Mike shrugged. “I can’t be sure. But it has to be. This guy is a piece of work. Seriously. He seems to be in some sort of internal exile, living in this out-of-the-way hellhole. Like they sent him there to forget him and what he did.”

“What did he do?”

“I’m not sure. But his driver took me to the airport and from the way he was talking I would think Carillo was knee deep in the dirty war in the 80s. Tens of thousands of people got killed back then. Your classic Latin American shit show. Death squads, massacres. The works.”

“And the shooter?” Dee asked.

“Most of the victims were Mayan Indians. She’s a Mayan.”

“Coincidence?”

“You don’t believe in them. What do you think it means?”

Dee walked over to the mini-bar and yanked out two little bottles of Jack Daniels. She poured them neat into glasses and handed one to Mike, then downed her own. Mike sipped at his. He savored the burn of the liquid on his throat and the surge of warmth it brought him.

“I haven’t got a clue,” Dee said. “But I do know I don’t like it. If it was not for this goddamn crazy bitch taking a shot at our man, I’d be happy enough to forget it. Just call the money Christine sent to Carillo school fees and leave it at that.”

“If it was not for that “crazy bitch” we would not be in this position,” Mike said.

Dee grinned wickedly. “Now that is surely true, my boy,” she said. “But that great irony does not help us get out of our predicament. We need to know more about this man and what our candidate did down there on his stint in Central America. This is dangerous. It’s military stuff and we built this campaign on the foundation of his service record.”

She paused for thought. “We can’t afford to have anything mess with that strategy. He must remain pure on national security. So we need to you to find out more about what Carillo did during the war. See if there’s a link from him to our shooter. Perhaps you should look up some of Hodges’ old colleagues from his army days. Just sniff out what you can.”

Mike sighed. He wanted back out on the streets; he wanted to give speeches to teams of students, eager for the fight; he wanted to see the look on their faces as they shifted from skeptics to believers. He was sick of skulking in shadows, digging in obscure corners.

“This is not what I signed up for, Dee,” he said.

Dee looked at him with sympathy. She handed him another little bottle from the mini-bar. “You’re a soldier now, Mike. You follow orders. But you do it because you believe in Hodges. You do it because our cause is just. Because when we win this thing, we are going to get a chance to really change things.”

Mike looked at Dee. There was not a trace of doubt in her voice. She was straight with him, like a mother to a son, explaining the lessons of a hard, unforgiving world.

“That’s why you’re here, right? You want to make a difference. Let me tell you a story, Mike. Where I grew up there was a big appliance factory in my town. Just about everybody worked in that place, including my daddy. Then one day the company that owned it discovered they could make things twice as cheap if they shipped everything off to Mexico. My daddy’s job went south overnight. Literally. So did our nice little home. We ended up moving from place to place for a while. My daddy started drinking and he swatted us kids around and my mama too. Nothing serious, but enough that these days they would’ve put him away.”

The room was quiet. Mike never heard Dee talk like this. She stared off into that distant place, back to a past he never really guessed about. It was hard to think of Dee as a young girl, vulnerable and scared, wondering what turned her daddy into a figure of fear and violence.

“You see, Mike, my daddy ended up mean and for a while I hated him for that. But when I got a bit older and, God forgive me, long after he died, I came to understand one thing: he didn’t begin that way. It was his life that made him mean. Some faceless bastard took away what little he had for a bit more profit. It humiliated him, made him think working with his hands was useless. Told him he was just something to be exported overseas. It made him poor. I’m in this to try and stop that happening to folks anymore. To try and make this country a little better for people whose families are like mine.”

She smiled wanly. “Now ain’t that a story for ya? Ol’ Dee the bleeding heart. Well don’t be fooled, Mike, because ol’ Dee will still castrate any living mother fucker who stands in her way.”

Mike laughed out loud and raised his drink to her. They clinked their glasses.

“We have a bit of common ground, Dee. My ex-wife Jaynie. She’s in a heap of trouble. Some of it’s her own fault. She’s into drugs and a bad crowd. But Christ, you should see where we grew up. There’s nothing left of that town. The jobs went. The downtown’s a mess. The police aren’t worth a thing. There’s nothing for her there. No wonder she gets high. She overdosed a week ago. She’s lucky to be alive.”

Dee ran a hand through his hair, protectively. “That’s why we have to win, Mike. Politics is power. When we get power we can rewrite the rules. That’s why I need your help with another thing.”