The Candidate

by Paul Harris

  “I’ve done all I can with him,” Dee said. “Now we let him fly.”

  She need not have worried.

  The first exchanges were dully educational. Each candidate made a beginning statement and then the talk drifted between issues. Stanton and Hodges never looked at each other, though neither seemed ill at ease. Stanton, in particular, appeared relaxed and happy enough to let the debate go through the motions. After all, it was she, as one of the most well known figures in national politics, who stood twenty points up in the Iowa polls. It was she who assembled a fund-raising machine that out-raised every other candidate, combined. She stood by Hodges and did not even glance across at him. He was not there to her.

  At least not until the final question.

  It was about national security and each candidate gave a boilerplate answer. Stanton had just finished speaking when it came to Hodges. He was quiet for a moment — his usual trick to focus an audience’s attention — and then he seemed to stretch himself taller. He cleared his throat and his voice was crystal clear. For the first time, he looked directly at Stanton and Stanton’s face froze. She looked puzzled. Just a little. Just enough to indicate that underneath that calm visage, the ice was creaking a little.

  “Unlike my fellow candidates, I am not a career politician,” he said, keeping his eyes on her and letting the implication hang just a moment in the air. “I don’t think of politics as a job. Seeing it that way makes every decision about polls. It makes every move you make about the next election. You fail to understand that there are problems in this country that need fixing and that are far more important things than any one politician’s popularity. I view my candidacy the same way as my time in the army. I am here to serve my country. I’ll take the hits for it if need-be. I’ll stand in the line of fire.”

  He left the words hanging, the subtle reminder of the week’s past events. Then he turned away from Stanton and back to face the cameras.

  “I would ask the people watching at home: how many of my fellow candidates really know what it’s like to serve their country? Or are they just serving themselves?”

  In the hotel room Dee, Mike and the other staffers leapt to their feet. Hodges’ attack was so unexpected but so perfectly delivered that no one saw it coming. Dee grabbed Mike and hugged him.

  “Did you prime him with those lines?” he asked.

  Dee shook her head. “I primed him with a bunch of others, but he didn’t use them. I tell you, Mike, this son-of-a-bitch is a natural. I knew it when I signed on. We’re going to be the headline news again after this.”

  She gazed upwards, seemingly seeing beyond the dull, cheap plaster of the hotel room’s ceiling and far out, beyond, and up into the sky. “There’s something special here. Do you feel it?”

  Mike looked at Dee. Her face was utterly alive and animated.

  “You know what it is, Mike?” she asked. “It’s belief. People can believe in Jack Hodges. That’s rare. That’s special.”

  “I know,” said Mike. “I’ve never felt this way about a politician before.”

  Dee laughed. “We sound like two high school girls discussing their latest crush,” she said. Then she stopped and frowned. “But you know what else? It also makes me want to know why someone tried to kill him. I don’t like not knowing who that woman is who wanted our Jack dead.”

  Mike looked at Dee. Her tone changed completely. Back to business.

  “The cops said she was just some homeless kook,” Mike said. “They don’t even have a name. Just a crazy lady with a gun.”

  Dee grasped him by the hand and looked him straight in the eye.

  ’Jack Hodges is our man now. We need to be protecting him from nasty surprises. We need to know more about that woman than the cops do. It’s time for you to take a little trip to jail, Mike. You need to pay her a visit.”

  * * *

  WITH A sudden shove, Lauren O’Keefe was rammed back against the wall of the living room. She glared at the man who bumped his fat backside into her, but realized that in this crush of people she could do little more than silently curse him. It was astonishing, she thought, to see what happened to the Hodges campaign. As a political blogger, funding her coverage of the election on her own dime, desperately hoping to make it big, she regularly checked in with the former General’s campaign. It was always the same. The good candidate playing to a tiny audience in half-full barns or school halls. He just gave his stump speech and moved on.

  But now this.

  It was meant to be a house party in Iowa City, but the suburban couple who invited Hodges into their home clearly had no idea what his campaign had become. Their spacious McMansion was big enough for 50 people. Maybe. Not 250. Every available space in all the downstairs rooms was rammed with bodies desperately crammed in, craning their heads to see Hodges, standing on a stool in the hall, giving his speech and taking their questions.

  With the physical difficulty of a contortionist, Lauren managed to get out a notebook and pen and jot down a few quotes. But eventually she just gave up and watched Hodges listen patiently to a series of questions. He did not seem to have changed much with his new status as a political rock star.

  One young woman, her voice almost impossible to hear, was on the edge of tears as she spoke of how job after job had departed overseas, leaving her struggling to find even minimum wage work. Hodges spoke quietly to her, touching her elbow and gently squeezing her arm like a concerned father. It seemed a moment designed for that single voter alone, not the TV cameras peering over people’s heads.

  Suddenly another body bumped into Lauren as Hodges bade a quick goodbye to the crowd. She delivered a sharp kick in the direction the bump came from. A yelp revealed her blow hit home.

  “Excuse me,” she said quickly and looked into the startled face of a youngish, red-haired man. He looked angry and then his face softened when he saw her.

  “No problem. I think I bumped you. Hey, I know you. You’re a blogger, right? For the Horse Race? I’m Mike Sweeney,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m with the Senator’s staff.”

  The two shook hands awkwardly as the crowd moved around them like an ebbing and flowing human tide.

  “Quite a change to your campaign, Mike. You must be delighted,” Lauren said.

  “It’s certainly a bit different from a week ago. But, you know, the Senator deserves this. He’s the best candidate by far.”

  “Yeah. But it all changed in Mount Pleasant. That was a very scary moment,” Lauren said.

  “Were you there?”

  Lauren nodded. She noticed Mike’s interest pique like he had suddenly extended radio antennae from his head. She smiled inwardly and told him how she had been in the sparse crowd, absent-mindedly checking emails, when she heard Christine scream. Then it was chaos. She crouched down, unsure of what was going on; her ears ringing painfully from the single shot.

  “Did you see the woman with the gun?” Mike asked.

  “I saw her get arrested. Two cops dragged her out. She didn’t say a word. She was just blank, like she was high or something. I looked right into her face, but she just stared past me. It was spooky.”

  She shivered at the thought, partly just to hold Mike’s attention, but also from the memory itself. Since then, she dreamed of the woman several times, always remembering how roughly she was dragged away, and her black, dense eyes, impenetrably staring out at some distant vision. The woman’s face was like a statue’s, sculpted out of unmoving rock.

  Lauren snapped herself out of it and shrugged. “It’s amazing to think some crazy like that could get so close to a candidate. But, hey, this is Iowa. It’s all about pressing the flesh and getting out there with the people.”

  Mike laughed.

  “Yeah. But not quite like that.”

  “Still,” Lauren said. “Hodges is not the only one to benefit. My blog has seen traffic go up nearly a 100 times since the shooting. I might even be able to start earning money from this thing.”

  “B
ut what about the woman?” Mike asked. “Did you get any sense of where she was from? Who she might be?”

  Lauren stopped. Suddenly she felt she was the subject of an interview. She paused and ignored the question. “So, Mike. On the record, tell me about why Senator Hodges attacked Governor Stanton in the debate last night?”

  Mike laughed. He looked at Lauren, saw her brown eyes widening innocently behind her blond fringe.

  “I gotta go, Lauren,” he said. “I’ll see you around.”

  * * *

  DRIVING AWAY from Iowa City and back down the long, straight overly familiar freeway to Des Moines, Mike could not stop thinking about Lauren. Or the feelings of guilt he had whenever he felt attracted to anyone other than Jaynie. Even five years after their divorce and Jaynie’s continued run-ins with drugs, Mike still wasn’t over her. He felt no clean break, just a ragged emotional tear. He couldn’t believe it could take so long to get someone out of your system. It was as if their time together left them embedded in each other’s flesh, picking out the hooks one by one.

  He gripped the car wheel and kept driving, striving instead to think of what Lauren said about the night Hodges was almost killed.

  “She was just blank.”

  That seemed to fit with everything else he heard. The shooter was an anonymous space. A nothing. A void. All the press coverage about the event didn’t add much to the original police line. She was a kook, a nut, a roamer with no identity. Getting a gun was not hard in these parts, even for people like that. And wanting to kill a presidential candidate was hardly an original ambition. No, it was Hodges’ heroism that was the story. Not the shooter. Now profile after profile looked at Hodges’ service in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. His climbing of the career ladder right up to General, before breaking into politics rather than retire into the comfort of being military top brass.

  Mike rubbed his eyes. This drive back to Des Moines was becoming increasingly dangerous because of the little sleep he was getting. With relief he finally pulled into the parking lot of the Embassy Suites and walked through the lobby. He wanted to go straight to bed but as he waited at the elevator he heard a familiar peel of raucous laughter from the bar area. He walked over and poked his head around the door to peer inside. Dee was sitting on the bar top, a whisky in one hand, holding court with a gaggle of staffers. They were giggling at one of her more lurid stories from campaigns past, like courtiers around a queen. Dee looked up and noticed Mike. She left her audience to pick up the pieces of the party without her for a moment, as she walked toward Mike. There was a swagger to her stride, just like some sort of cowboy. Mike smiled to himself.

  Dee thrust a beer bottle into Mike’s hands as he started to raise them in protest.

  “Don’t even think about not drinking it, buddy,” she said in a tone of voice that immediately forced him to put the bottle to his mouth. “We’ve got some celebrating to do. Latest poll news came out. Guess what? We’re up twelve points. Twelve fucking points!”

  Mike did some quick mental calculations.

  “Third place?”

  Dee shook her head.

  “Fourth. Stanton’s on 30 still. Then Grady and Shaw are on 20 apiece. But we’ve gone from virtually nowhere to 15. And our trend is upwards. We’re hot, Mike. We are HOT.”

  Mike swigged the beer and felt the cold liquid wash down his throat. But he had barely a moment to savor it before Dee carried on talking.

  “I’ve got some other news too. I’ve swung you an interview with our shooter. Tomorrow morning you go to Evansville jail. The prison governor is all sweet on Hodges and I told him giving us access was a personal favor. It’s not going to be a problem for you to get a bit of face time.”

  Dee stared at Mike and he nodded. Mike understood the sudden gravity of the task. “No problem.”

  “Good boy, Mike,” Dee said. “Find out everything you can. Remember, we stand in the way between the Senator and nasty surprises. That’s our job.”

  * * *

  THE PRISON guard leaned on the wall opposite Mike in the tiny interrogation room. He regarded the campaign worker with the look of a school boy examining an ant. Curious, half-disgusted, perhaps thinking of the effort it might take to squash him. He had a slab-like face that looked like it might have been cut deep from the winter ice in a frozen Iowa river.

  “So, you with the Hodges campaign, huh?” the man asked. “My boss likes him a whole lot. Seems to think he just might change the world.”

  Mike nodded. The man’s expression softened a little as he hitched up his belt, on which hung an array of keys, a set of handcuffs and a can of mace.

  “What do you think?” Mike asked.

  “I hadn’t heard of him until a week ago. But he seems like a good man,” the guard said. “Leastways, I’m glad he didn’t get shot.”

  Mike looked around him at the room, bare except for a table and two metal chairs. He had been waiting for someone to bring the prisoner to him for half an hour and he was praying there wasn’t a problem: that Dee’s links with the prison warden would hold up and nothing would go wrong.

  “She’s a strange one, though,” the guard continued. “She hasn’t said a word since she got here. Seems like a robot. Eats her food, does as she’s told, not a moment’s trouble. She just don’t say nothing.”

  “Not a word?” Mike asked. He tried making his voice sound casual.

  “Nope. Police think she’s just a crazy. Only lead they had was that she stayed a night in that flea-pit motel, the Havana, up on Route 55. But the place didn’t even ask her for a name. Apart from that she’s like a ghost.”

  “A ghost or something else? What do you think?” Mike asked.

  The guard looked at him warily, as if sensing some sort of trap. But he clearly liked talking about the mysterious prisoner and giving vent to his thoughts. He took a deep breath.

  “What do I think? I think she’s some sort of Indian. Off of one of them reservations out West. She sure looks like an Indian and God knows, they probably don’t keep records that much. The cops have one thing right, though. She’s crazy. Just take one look in her eyes and you see that.”

  Mike opened his mouth to ask another question. But at that moment the door to the interrogation room opened. He sat upright and the guard jumped off the wall to stand at attention.

  She walked in.

  The figure of the shooter – the would-be assassin of Senator Jack Hodges – seemed absurdly small. She was perhaps just over 5 feet tall with dark, tanned skin and jet- black hair. She shuffled forward slowly, between two burly guards. She wore a bright orange jumpsuit and her hands were cuffed in front of her. Her oval face was lined though, betraying that she was well into her 40s if not older. She did not look like a killer. But even here, dwarfed by the giant men around her, she had a presence. A sense of dead calm at the center of whatever was going around her, something quiet and foreboding.

  Mike looked at the woman and a mix of emotions swirled through his head, fear and awe intertwined. She sat down at the desk and gave Mike a blank stare. Mike held her gaze for a few seconds, her eyes full of black, barely any white at all, like holes in her head from which her real eyes had retreated. Then he turned away.

  “Okay,” said the guard. “We’ll get out of here. You’ve got 15 minutes.”

  The door clicked softly behind them, leaving nothing but a grim silence, like a grove deep in a forest, where even the fiercest wind cannot stir.

  Mike looked again at the woman but he was unsure if she could even see him. He understood why the guard might think she was an Indian. Her darkness and her hair resembled a Sioux or an Apache from any old Western film. Or perhaps she was from further south, over the border down in Mexico.

  “What is your name?” he asked.

  Nothing came in return. The woman, ignoring him, turned her head to look around at her new surroundings.

  ‘Cual es su nombre?” he tried in Spanish.

  The woman did not even glance at him. He pepper
ed her with questions, sometimes in English and sometimes in Spanish. But at no time did she even give a hint of understanding or listening to him. Perhaps, he thought with bitter humor, he should have brought along a Comanche phrase book. Just on the off-chance. Throwing questions at her in an Indian language could not have any less impact. His voice was the only sound in the room. Eventually, he just grew quiet. He leaned forward, his elbows resting on the table and his chin propped up by the tips of his fingers. Almost as if in prayer or supplication. A distant clang signaled the opening of a door across the hallway. The guards were coming back. Just for a moment, Mike saw a flicker of something cross the woman’s face. She heard the sound too. She knew what it meant. There was something in there behind her mask.

  “Look at me,” he said firmly.

  She turned her eyes to meet his, devoid of expression.

  “I will find out who you are. I will find out why you wanted to kill a good man.”

  And then she was gone. With a burst of life, the guards entered the room, sucking the tight, taut air out of the chamber and filling it with the scraping of chairs and the stamping of boots. The woman stood up and left, without even glancing behind her, leaving Mike by himself. Silent. Contemplating a woman who seemed a human void.

  CHAPTER 4

  A CLOUD OF smoke hung over the half-eaten breakfast of General Rodrigo Estrada Carillo. His cigar, already burned down a third of its length despite the fact it was barely past 9:00 a.m., stuck out of his mouth like a glowing taper. He looked down with undisguised disgust at the plate of beans, fried plantain and round pink slices of sausage in front of him. His useless servant, Mohubub, never cooked well. But what could one expect of a Garifuna? Still, breakfast seemed to prove a singular challenge to him.

  The General sighed, put his cigar to one side, and reached out for a bottle of violently spicy red hot sauce. He dashed liberal amounts of the scarlet liquid all over the meal and then took another bite. He felt the stinging burn light up his mouth. That was better. At least now it tasted like something. He took a few more mouthfuls, then pushed away the plate and poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot Mohubub brewed. He retrieved his cigar and got up to stand on his balcony and survey the day.