The Candidate

by Paul Harris

  Carillo was a short man whose large belly sat uneasily on his frame, giving the impression that he was almost literally round. He wore a pair of faded pants and a shirt he had not bothered to button up. His face was covered with a tangled, dark, wiry beard, but his brown eyes glittered out of the mess with a fierce intensity. He stood on the balcony and looked out over the same scene that he’d viewed virtually every morning for the almost entire fifteen years he’d been stuck here. It was a view of exile: trapped on the Caribbean coast of Guatemala, hundreds of miles away from the capital of Guatemala City, where his family had lived for generations. He leaned forward and blew out a last plume of smoke. Then he let his cigar fall onto the street below where it joined the decaying husks of scores of others, similarly dropped each morning.

  The ramshackle city that stretched out beneath him to the crystalline blue of a calm sea was a decaying tropical mess. Livingston. Home to a mix of Mayan Indians, descendents of African slaves called Garifunas and a handful of Latinos. Carillo viewed the place as a hellhole. It was always hot here. Stinking thick tropical heat that drenched his skin and left him constantly dabbing his forehead and cheeks in a losing battle against sweat.

  What a strange place for a man like him to end up, he thought. A man whose family came to Guatemala more than three hundred years ago from the Mother Country of Spain. Who toiled among the ungrateful natives to civilize the place. Who won a great fortune in land and mines and had done so much to create a proud, independent country that they called their own. And yet his personal slice of it was now this faded old villa in Livingston. Rotting here among the Indians and the blacks, with their infernal drum music that kept him awake at night. It was exile. There was no other word for it. Forced to stay here by a government that did not understand that he had always acted in the best interests of this country. He felt a surge of anger, but closed his eyes and waited for the moment to pass. There was no point. He had endured this place for so many long years. It was his final patriotic sacrifice. He would do his duty. Many others met far worse fates.

  He took a swig of coffee and immediately spat it out. That fool Mohubub! His coffee was even worse than his breakfast. It was far too bitter; it tasted like the black bastard cursed it before pouring it in the pot. The General straightened his back and started to button his shirt. He would walk into town this morning, he decided, and buy a decent cup of coffee from the little café on the town square.

  “Federico!” he called and walked back into the breakfast room.

  Almost immediately a tall, thin man entered. He had cropped black hair and a face covered with pockmarks, the lasting scars from a childhood marred by illness. The man nodded but did not say a word.

  “Come. This morning I want to drink proper coffee. Not this vile stuff that Mohubub pisses out.”

  The General walked out of the house, his shirt now buttoned up. Federico walked about two feet behind him, his eyes darting from one side to another, subtly, but enough to reassure the General that he was always doing his job. Protecting him, watching over him, keeping him safe. Together the pair walked down a cobblestone road that led from Carillo’s villa into the town and its harbor, near where a great river poured into the Bahia de Amatique. Carillo squinted against the bright sun, already feeling the sweat pouring down his back. He liked to watch the flowing waters emptying into the sea. He liked to tell Federico that he felt a kinship with it, so far from its familiar homelands, drifting out into the unknown, propelled by the irresistible force of gravity. But he did not feel the poetic mood taking him today. Today he just wanted a decent coffee.

  The General and Federico marched on, earning a few nods from passersby familiar with their ritual forays into town. But others, especially the Indians, crossed the road as the pair walked forward, darting into homes and down sidestreets. The General pretended not to notice and Federico, relishing it as a sport, occasionally glared after them, or, in the case of fearful young children, sent them scurrying away with a sudden lunge in their direction, followed by a burst of harsh, grating laughter.

  Finally they arrived at the Café Hermann and the General settled into a seat at the back, shielded from the view of the street. Federico perched himself by the door, sitting on a stool, casting an eye out onto the road. The owner of the café scurried over with a steaming pot of coffee and poured the General a cup and then carefully laid a folded newspaper by its side.

  “Thank you, Don Hermann,” Carillo said and he took a sip. That was better. Good Guatemalan coffee, straight from the highlands around Antigua and made hot and fresh. It was worth the walk, the heat and the stares of the strange people in this town, the General thought. He felt a brief and rare sense of satisfaction come over him, of being part of the world again. He glanced at the newspaper and then picked it up, scanning the headlines. The dreary news from the capital and the latest goings on of the government held no interest for him. He could not bear to read such things while he was stuck here. He flipped through to the foreign pages. After all, he was a man of the world. It would not do to become ignorant and it was far too long since he last read a newspaper.

  He fished out a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket and perched them on the end of his nose. He peered at the picture on a page devoted to news from America. There was a sudden shock of recognition. The picture was of a man. A man with a solid jaw that Carillo remembered well. A man whose face Carillo had not seen in many years. He was standing, one arm thrust out, protecting a woman behind him. Carillo peered closer, his nostrils flaring as he began to feel his heart race. Yes! It is her too. It is Jack and Christine Hodges.

  He read the headline. “Presidente Hodges?” it asked. He put down the paper. He did not need to read the story. He stared ahead of him, out into the street and beyond that, to the thin blue horizon of the sea. His hands clenched into fists and he felt, for the first time in a long time, a true surge of anger at his exile; at the unrelenting shame of it. He folded up the paper and finished his coffee in a single gulp. Enough, he thought. He needed his due. He deserved a reward for all his service and some compensation for his exile. General Rodrigo Estrada Carillo felt a sense of purpose come back into his life.

  * * *

  MIKE DIALED his hometown area code, tapping out the familiar numbers on his hotel room’s phone with movements that felt ingrained into his mind. The phone rang twice and then he heard Sean’s voice answer.

  “Mike?” his old friend asked. “Is that you? Jesus, where have you been hiding?”

  Mike felt a stab of guilt. It seemed that for the last few years his life in Florida left him no time for anyone except those he worked with. His schedule consisted of a non-stop series of court cases against huge fruit corporations, meetings and organizing drives. Now, if anything, he was even busier on the Hodges campaign, getting maybe five hours of sleep a night, if he was lucky. The campaign was all consuming and ate up time with a ferocious appetite that was impossible to satiate.

  “Sorry, buddy,” he said. “I’m a bad best friend.”

  Sean laughed. Mike knew Sean didn’t really mind. Their families had been friends for years, since before they were born. And though Mike had moved away, Sean stayed in Corinth Falls. Still, their ties remained strong. Now Sean had a family of his own, scraping by on an electrician’s salary.

  “Your mom said you were on the Hodges campaign,” Sean said. “Pretty exciting stuff.”

  Mike knew Sean would want to know all about it, get a glimpse of a life he suspected was more exciting and adventurous than his own. But Mike didn’t have the time to get into it. “Yeah, it’s a lot of work,” he said. “But actually it was something my mom told me that I wanted to talk to you about. It’s Jaynie.”

  The dreaded and loved words again. There was a pause on Sean’s end of the phone.

  “Mom seems to think she’s on something again,” Mike said. “Maybe she’s in trouble. I was just wondering if you knew anything?”

  Sean sighed. In the background, Mike hea
rd the sounds of a child crying and the clatter of plates in a kitchen.

  “I’ve heard a few rumors,” Sean said. “Someone said they thought she was into meth again. Maybe even cooking some up. But I don’t know anything concrete.”

  Mike closed his eyes. Cooking up meth? Jesus, Jaynie. He knew it was possible. The two of them knew about folks up in the hills outside of town who ran an entire meth-smuggling network, making the drug in trailers in the woods and running it all over the state. It seemed like a different world now, not just a different time.

  “Could you check in on her?” Mike asked.

  “Sure, I’ll look her up,” said Sean. “I don’t suppose you’re coming back this way anytime soon?”

  There was a hint of reproach in his voice. Sean was a busy man too. Working a tough job and raising a family was every bit as demanding as the hours Mike was putting in on this campaign. Harder even.

  “Thanks, man,” Mike said. “I’ll try and come back when I can and see her myself.”

  But he remembered the last time that happened. Two years ago, he took a break from his work in Florida and popped back to New York to visit Corinth Falls. He wasn’t able to resist calling on Jaynie, just to check on her. To make sure she had not destroyed herself completely. It did not go well and ended with Mike fleeing Jaynie’s rundown house – the one they bought together – with an array of pots and pans being flung after him. He still remembered the banshee-like wail that Jaynie screamed at him as he brought up her drug use and asked her to give it up. She immediately turned on him and he fled like a hunted fox.

  A renewed bout of child’s crying sounded in the background and Sean shouted something to his wife, before turning his attentions back to Mike. “Hey, sorry, family beckons. But don’t worry, I’ll make some time to check in on Jaynie and let you know. Don’t be a stranger, Mike. Don’t forget us.”

  Sean said the words lightly. Yet Mike took them hard. Forgetting would never be a problem. But he already felt like a stranger. He put down the now dead phone and gazed around his hotel room. This sterile space was his home now. At least for the moment. Before another hotel room would take its place; different, but just like it. He got up and walked over to the mini-bar and took out a tiny bottle of whiskey. He unscrewed the cap and began to sip it, just as there was a knock on the door.

  It was Dee. She took one look at him, holding the tiny bottle, and laughed.

  “Mike, my boy, how are you finding the pressures of campaign life?” she said with a sly wink. “We’ll have you drinking from much bigger bottles than that before this show’s over.”

  Dee did not wait for an explanation but just sat down on Mike’s bed. She clutched a print-out of a blog entry. Mike could see it was from the Horse Race. It looked like Lauren had written up something about the mysterious woman behind bars in the local jail.

  “Anything new in there?” he asked.

  Dee shook her head. “Nope. Just a retread of everything we know. But I don’t like it, Mike. So far the press has given us an easy time on this one. They’ve bought in so much to Jack as a hero that they’re skipping over who this woman might be. Homeless crazy satisfies them at the moment. But it might not last and this blogger, Lauren O’Keefe, seems to want some answers. She might trigger others in to digging deeper. That means we’ve got to be one step ahead of them. You’re my point man on this, Mike.”

  Mike shrugged.

  “Does that article mention anything about a Havana Motel? The place she stayed at the night before she came to Mount Pleasant?”

  Dee glanced at it again, her eyes darting over the page. “Not a word.”

  Mike smiled. “Then we’re one step ahead. It’s all I’ve got. But the police have already been there. No name was left.”

  That was not enough for Dee. “Check it out anyway. These Iowa cops ain’t worth a damn on this sort of thing. I got a feeling this woman’s a fly in our ointment, Mike. I want to know what sort of fly she is. Is she just a big ol’ harmless house fly, or is she the biting kind?”

  Mike put down the little bottle of whiskey. It was empty now anyway. He also put all thoughts of Jaynie, his home, and his past, out of his mind. There was no time for that. Not now. There was work to do.

  * * *

  THE HAVANA motel lay on the northern edge of Des Moines, just as the landscape broke up into a mix of new subdivisions and square, brown fields edged with trees. It was a cold and gray morning as Mike pulled up, got out of his car and shivered against the weather. It was here that rural Iowa began, with its farms and gently rolling landscape hinting at the prairie that it once was – and, judging by the tall grass that grew up on any vacant lot, would quickly be again if ever given the chance.

  The Havana was a one-story relic from the 1950s, arranged in a square horseshoe shape around a tarmac parking lot which long winters had disintegrated into a spider’s web of cracks. At one end of the horseshoe there was an empty swimming pool, its diving board promising nothing more than a six-foot leap into bare concrete. At the other end lay a management office with a sign hanging on the door that read, optimistically, “Vacancies. Inquire within“. The fact that there were only a half dozen cars in the parking lot seemed to indicate there was always room at this particular inn. Or that it played host to the sort of guests who did not need a whole night to carry out their business. Mike walked over and pushed open the door. An old man sat behind the desk, thin as one of the frozen telephone poles that lined the road outside. His chin was frosted with white stubble and his teeth were yellowed. In a voice turned gravely from cigarettes, he asked Mike if he wanted a room. Mike shook his head.

  “I’m here about the woman who tried to shoot Senator Hodges. I work with his campaign.”

  The man looked him up and down with a barely disguised hostility. “The cops have already been here. We don’t got nothing to say about her. No idea who she was.”

  “Mind if I look at her room?”

  The man thought about it for a minute, casting his eyes back down to the paper, weighing his options. Eventually he shrugged his scrawny shoulders, got up and beckoned Mike to follow him. They trudged across the frozen parking lot heading to one of the motel’s anonymous-looking rooms. It was number 37. The man opened the door.

  “Ain’t no different to any other room. She didn’t leave nothin’ behind neither.”

  Mike walked in. The room was sparse, with little more than a dingy bed, its faded linens pulled tightly around the mattress. An ancient-looking TV sat in one corner. Its walls were bare of any form of decoration and its bathroom tiles were streaked and stained. Yet, against his better judgment, against all rational thought, Mike felt he could sense the woman’s presence here. The void that existed within her had been in this place too, sucking something from it, yet leaving a trace of its passing. He shook his head. He was imagining things, he told himself. “Anyone see her?” he asked.

  The man shook his head. “I let her in. She didn’t barely say a word. Just paid 20 bucks and took the room. I took her for a whore. But I didn’t see no John with her and she seemed kinda old for that line of work. Still, wouldn’t be the strangest whore I seen around here.”

  The man stared directly at Mike, daring him to be shocked at his words. He spat theatrically on the floor. “We ain’t exactly the Sheraton, mister,” he added.

  Mike was about to give up, when suddenly a thought hit him. “The cleaner? The person who cleaned the rooms that morning. Who was that?”

  The man shifted a little and shrugged his bird-like shoulders, so bony you could see his collar bone and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like an elevator.

  “I can’t recall,” he said.

  Mike reached into his pocket and took out his wallet. “This must be a tough job. Pretty bad pay and some pretty mean customers.”

  Mike took out two 20 dollar bills and reached over to tuck them into the breast pocket of the man’s shirt. He felt the man’s bones poking through the skin beneath the material, hard and r
idged, seemingly covered by skin as thin and brittle as parchment.

  “Suppose I could look at the roster?” Mike asked.

  They trudged back to the management office and the man hauled out a thick book from beneath the desk. He opened it and thumbed through the pages, peering at tiny lines of almost undecipherable inky handwriting.

  “Ernesto. Ernesto Benitez was the guy who cleaned that room,” he said, with the self-satisfied air of a man who just solved a puzzle.

  “And where does he live? When’s he next in?”

  The man turned back to the book and flicked through pages of writing until eventually he turned over one sheet that was only half-full of scrawl. He snorted to himself. “Well, he lives over at a trailer park at Elm and Huntsville in Altoona. But he ain’t been in since the morning he cleaned that woman’s room. Looks like young Ernesto must have left our employment.”

  The two men looked at each other across the book laid out on the desk. Their eyes met, each perhaps realizing the significance of that information, or deciding to shy away from it.

  “People leave all the time,” the man said. His voice, though, was weak and by the time he finished his sentence, Mike was already half-way to his car, pangs of doubt starting to gnaw on the edges of his mind.

  CHAPTER 5

  GENERAL CARILLO SAT at his table and looked at his dining companion, the Livingston police chief, Antonio Alvarez Zaragosa. The last remnants of a bottle of red wine were dripping from Zaragosa’s voluminous moustache like he had some desperate, alcoholic flu. Thank God he kept back the expensive Chilean stuff and served only Argentine table wine instead, Carillo thought. He was long familiar with Zaragosa’s appetites and only a fool would waste good wine on such an oaf.