by Paul Harris
“So can we expect to see your thoughts expressed in print?” Dee asked.
“You can, Dee. Keep up the good fight.”
Armstrong hung up and Dee smiled. There was a long road ahead of them and it would not be an easy one. But she at last could see a path. She walked back into the studio. The interview was over and Hodges and Christine stood together, their arms around each other’s waists, and chatted amiably with the main producer.
Dee watched them for a moment. She was actually happy. She even enjoyed these moments of crisis. It was when she was at the peak of her game. She thought about Mike and could not believe he did this to her. That he sought to sabotage everything they worked for. For what? Some misguided idea of principle. Did he think principles were best served by destroying their best chance for the White House and letting that fool currently in the Oval Office get a second term? Well, she needed to deal with Mike now. She promised to destroy him and Dee never broke promises. Never.
* * *
AS HODGES’ interview ended, Mike felt physically sick. His face was pale and sweaty as if he had a fever. His mother, perched on the arm of the couch, put a comforting hand on his shoulder. He was desperate for a shot of alcohol. It was a physical ache, like a gigantic hole opened inside his chest and he needed to pour something in it to fill it up.
“Hon, it wasn’t too bad. You’ve done the right thing. You stood up for what is right. That’s all that matters,” she said softly, her voice full of concern.
But Mike knew the interview went like a charm for Hodges. The talking heads were already on the television discussing the nature of patriotism and if the mainstream media was inherently anti-American. The details of the allegations against Hodges were lost in the miasma. They were too difficult to process, too obscure and too long ago. It was easier to frame the debate with domestic politics, not Guatemala’s bloody past, and Hodges’ interview played into that superbly. He cried out to the public to defend those who defended it and few pundits dared not follow that cry. He saw Dee’s cunning behind it all.
“Their strategy is going to work,” Mike said. “They’re going to get away with this.”
His mother shook her head. “The South Carolina election is nearly here, Michael. He’ll lose it. People will never vote for a man who did those things,” she said.
For a moment Mike wanted to scream that he knew better. That he worked inside this campaign and that no one ever lost an election on principles like that. He always despised the cynics before but now he knew he was one. Dee’s strategy was pitch-perfect. It appealed to the voters and the media alike. Suddenly, he needed to get away from the house. His mother would never understand. She led her life keeping strong to her belief in her community. But she was able to do that because she never left this god-awful dying town. She never tried to influence things beyond her home and her friends and people she knew. He tried to change the whole system. Now he realized just what sort of madness that was. He got up and flung on a jacket.
The cold air outside slapped him in the face like a spurned lover. His cheeks stung with the force of it. But he drew his jacket close around him and trudged down the streets heading for O’Rourke’s. Unlike the last time he had been there, with Sean and Jaynie, the grimy bar was virtually empty. So much had happened since that night of laughter and drunkenness that it felt like a lifetime ago. He sat in the darkness and ordered a bottle of beer and a chaser of bourbon. The only other customer was a scarecrow-like old man at the other end of the bar who stared myopically into space. His face drooped like a melted candle and the folds of his sunken cheeks hung like drapes around the windows of his eyes. A TV murmured dully in the corner and carried a debate show about Hodges’ recent interview. Mike looked in vain for the barman to get him to switch it off. The old man saw Mike look at the TV and called over.
“That boy Hodges really served our country,” he said with a determined glare. “It’s disgusting what they are doing to him. He was just doing his duty.”
Mike tried to smile but he could not. A feeling of dark horror crept up his throat and froze the expression on his face as a grimace and turned it into a mask for his despair.
CHAPTER 25
MIKE STRUGGLED INTO consciousness from a dream in which he was tossed at sea, caught up in gigantic waves that swamped him and left him gasping for air and clawing to escape from the suffocating waters. But he opened his eyes and realized it was his mother shaking him awake with a look of concern on her face.
He only dimly remembered a scattering of details from the last few hours at the bar. He knew he sank beer after beer in the gloom. Then he argued with some faceless group of men at the bar. He did not recall whether it was over politics. It could even have been about sports. Then he was shown the door by the burly barman and stumbled out into the streets. He weaved home and paused over the railway tracks. For a moment he thought about going to Jaynie’s trailer and taking the old shortcut over the rails. But then he remembered she was not there. She was in jail. Then he half-walked, half-stumbled home and collapsed into bed. He felt the remnants of the night’s alcohol course through his system like poison. He blinked his eyes and sat up and registered the look of dismay on his mother’s face.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I just needed to let off a little steam.”
But his mother’s look of worry remained. Still, she offered him a steaming cup of coffee. The bitter smell filled his nostrils and he fought down an urge to gag.
“Mom…?” he said.
He noticed that in her other hand she held a copy of the New York Post.
“There is no easy way to show you this,” she said.
He took the folded paper and spread it out in front of him. Splashed on the front page was a grainy picture. It was a police mug-shot of a man, staring into the camera with a look of blank shock. It took him several seconds to recognize the photograph.
It was him.
He was on the front page of the Post. He sat up and read the headline.
“HODGES LEAK MAN IN DRUG BUST” it blared in massive type.
Mike was not sure his heart beat anymore as he read the story. He just felt his blood freeze in his veins and his vision tunnel down to a small hole, focused on the printed words, like he read the story from the end of a long telescope.
The man who leaked details of Senator Jack Hodges’ military record in Guatemala was a disgruntled former staffer recently arrested on drug charges, sources told the Post.
Mike Sweeney, 29, was picked up in a trailer park with his ex-wife, Jaynie Collins, by police acting on a tip over a suspected, drug lab.
Police discovered drug-making equipment and over two pounds of meth amphetamine, a drug which causes havoc all over rural America and whose effect is likened to a heroin epidemic.
Sweeney, who worked for Hodges until recently, was kicked off the campaign once details of the drug charges were discovered, senior Hodges campaign sources claimed.
“He was always a problem. But the drugs bust was the last straw. We had to let him go. We hope Mike is able to get the help he needs,” said one top Hodges aide.
Dee had done it. She promised to destroy him and now she had. She got the arrest report from the night with Jaynie and spun it to wipe him off the face of the earth. He was finished. It was finished. The world thought he was a drug dealer. No one would touch the Hodges’ Guatemala story now. She had poisoned the source.
* * *
IT WAS a long and tense election day in South Carolina. Dee spent the morning driving around a few of the voting stations in Columbia by herself. She wanted to escape the hothouse atmosphere of the campaign headquarters for a while. It was hard to breathe in there. The last few days rocked everyone and everything. The campaign was a high flying jetliner suddenly hit by a downdraft and sent plummeting towards earth until the pilots frantically put it back on track. The experience jangled everyone’s nerves. It bloodied them all, especially the first-timers and the newcomers.
So Dee d
rove slowly around the suburbs and just soaked up the feeling. It did her good. The brutal truth was ordinary life carried on around them, she thought. Despite all the heat and fury of the campaign, most folks still went about their daily routines. What the neighbors did behind closed doors still meant more to the average voter than what Jack Hodges did twenty years ago. She watched harried moms, lone construction workers and a few students troop into the polling booth and then troop out again. They voted. They passed the ultimate judgment on Dee’s greatest lifework. And they did it while worried about a college football game or what they would cook their kids tonight for dinner.
The thought did not upset Dee. It calmed her. She remembered her own childhood and how far she came. She smiled, breathed in, and seemed to catch a waft of bayou air amid the South Carolina sunshine. Then, equilibrium restored, she got in her car and drove back downtown. Hodges stood up when she entered the campaign headquarters main meeting room. He looked tense and glanced at the sheaf of papers she clutched in her hand that an intern had foisted on her as soon as she walked in.
“How are we doing?” Hodges asked. His voice was a little hoarse as if he shouted all morning.
Dee put up a hand and scanned through the papers. Her eyes flicked down row upon row of polling numbers and cross-referenced back and forth. She tried to pull out some headline details and look into the poll’s entrails to divine the future.
She looked up. “I’m not going to lie you and say we haven’t been hit by this Guatemala shit storm,” she said. “We have. We got hit good and hard. But looking at this stuff I would say we’re still on top. We can win here and when we do Stanton is going to be out.”
Hodges lips creased into a thin smile. “How old is this data?”
“Before your TV interview. So, if anything, it shows us weaker than we are.”
Dee walked over to him. There was an air of unease about him that she never sensed before. Maybe, finally, after everything that happened over the last few months, the pressure was finally starting to chip away at him.
“It’s okay, Jack,” she said. “There’s nothing certain in this life. We have to hope the voters come through. Maybe they won’t. But this poll shows us in the lead. We’ve just got to wait.”
Hodges sat back down but she felt his nerves twitch inside him. “Goddamn that fucker Sweeney,” he said. “How the hell did we let someone involved with drugs get that close to us, Dee?”
Dee shrugged. “I was as shocked as anyone,” she said. “He comes from a troubled family, I guess. We shouldn’t blame him entirely for his problems. He’s not had it easy.”
Hodges shrugged. “Loyalty, Dee. I put a high value on that. It’s what we’re taught in the army. If he had a problem with my record he should come to me privately. Not try and bring us down.”
Dee almost replied but thought better of it. She thought of what Mike told her about Carillo’s man stalking him and Lauren outside their hotel room. The dead priest in a slum church. She saw Mike’s point of view. She did not blame him for the choice he made. Nor did she blame herself for destroying him. Hodges was wrong. Blind loyalty was not the ultimate virtue. Winning was. That was where Mike made a mistake. That was what she could not understand. He picked a losing strategy.
* * *
THEY WATCHED the countdown to the polls closing on CNN in Hodges’ hotel suite. It was just Hodges, Christine, Dee and a few other key staffers. A rally was planned in front of the Capitol just a few blocks away and they knew thousands of people were gathered there. Every so often the CNN camera switched to their reporter on the scene and they could see the throngs behind him and hear their cheers drown out the poor guy’s voice. But inside the room it was like an examination hall. There was complete silence and all eyes were glued to the screen. There was just five minutes until the polls closed. If they were lucky, the pundits would immediately call the race using exit poll data. If things were narrower, they would hold off.
Dee walked to the balcony door. She slid it open and lit up a cigarette. Christ, Dee thought, it feels like waiting to have teeth pulled. She longed for the sound and pain of actual drilling.
Three minutes to go now.
Then two.
Then one.
Then… nothing.
“Too close to call,” the graphic on the screen flashed, underneath smiling pictures of Hodges and Stanton opposite each other. Christine groaned and stood up, her hands clasped together. Hodges followed her and cast a glance at Dee.
“Relax,” Dee said. “I told you we’d get hit a little. I never thought we’d be ahead enough to declare victory straight away.”
She sounded confident. She felt confident. But still. A worm of doubt wriggled around deep her in her mind. What if… what if… it whispered.
A few minutes later the first results trickled in. A handful of counties in the Low Country reported their numbers. They were about six percent of the total and they put Hodges at 45 percent and Stanton at 46 percent. Again Hodges shot Dee a glance. Christine could not look at the screen. Dee shook her head and went back to the balcony again. She lit up and inhaled deeply on another cigarette even though she did not want one. She stared out into the night and strained her ears for the crowd she knew was just a thousand yards away. But, try as she might, she could not hear them.
Then she heard Christine yell. Dee jumped back in and saw Christine pointing at the TV screen and holding one hand over her mouth. Dee followed her gaze. Another clutch of votes was in, from all over the state: a few college towns, Charleston itself and a swathe of the mountain counties. Just over a quarter of the vote was counted. She looked at the score. Stanton was at 43 percent. Hodges was at 48.
Christine laughed and smiled a toothy, delighted grin. She danced a little jig and squealed in delight. Hodges clapped and suddenly Dee found herself swept up in his firm embrace and lifted off her feet. She wanted to resist, she wanted to urge caution. This was not over, she wanted to say. We must wait. But she could not resist him. She surrendered to the moment and five minutes later, as champagne corks popped on a dozen bottles and flowed into white plastic glasses, she heard an electronic boom come from the TV and watched the magic words explode across the screen.
“Hodges wins South Carolina.”
And Dee laughed. She laughed so hard she thought her lungs might burst in her chest from the sheer, soaring, unadulterated joy of it. They weathered the storm. They took the hits and they won.
* * *
MIKE WATCHED the results in a dulled haze in his mother’s living room. She sat by him and squeezed his hand as Hodges’ victory was announced. It’s okay, Michael,” she said. “It’s just South Carolina. Stanton is still in the fight, you know. We’re just three states in. This could be a long race.”
Mike knew they were just words meant to cheer him and bandage his wounds. He imagined the scenes inside Governor Stanton’s headquarters. The final, desperate hope of the last few days, as the Guatemalan scandal broke, was no doubt shattered. They knew the score. They were the frontrunner for so long but now they had only one narrow victory to their name, back in far-off Iowa, which felt like it happened in the last century. The momentum was with Hodges and it was unstoppable. Across the country the vital donors that fed money to the campaign machines would shut off the supply of cash to Stanton and open their wallets for Hodges. The two campaigns were mirror opposites: one collapsing, the other in the throes of celebrating victory. Every open door for Hodges would be a closed one to Stanton.
It was over.
Mike watched Stanton appear on the TV screen. In stark contrast to the crowds cheering at an outdoor rally for Hodges, her supporters gathered in a hotel ballroom. They waved campaign placards but nothing disguised the flat atmosphere. As Stanton drew herself up to the microphone, her face was lined and tired. Her smile looked as if the corners of her lips were tacked up with pins. She waved at them to stop and then thanked them all for coming.
“Obviously, we’ve all got a lot of thinking t
o do over the next few days as to where we go from here,” she said. Her voice was drowned out by a series of boos and cries of: “Stay in! Stay in!”
She smiled her fixed grin. “We will do what’s right for America. Thank you all for your work and support. God bless us all.”
It was not a concession. Not yet. But it paved the way for one. Mike guessed Stanton’s team figured they gained nothing from dropping out immediately. It made more sense to see what sort of negotiations they could pull off with Hodges’ campaign. With Dee. Even now Mike laughed to himself when he thought of how Dee would revel in all this. She would be in her element. He did not envy anyone on Stanton’s staff charged with striking a deal that did not basically amount to abject surrender.
He switched off the TV and went upstairs. It was done. What the hell would he do now? What was it all for? Perhaps he was cursed, he thought. He should never have left Corinth Falls in the first place. He should never have gone to Florida. He should never have gone to Iowa. It was not his place to try and shape the wider world. He should have stayed here and looked after those he loved; attended to their problems, not those of people he never really knew.
He thought of Jaynie in her prison cell and wondered what she was doing. Again he thought of how she tried to touch him in the back of the police car and how he shrank away from her hand. He felt a surge of guilt as crippling as the moment as when he told her he was leaving town; leaving her and their marriage behind; abandoning her to the twisted maelstrom of the drugs that controlled her. No one escapes their past, he thought. Not me. Not Jaynie. Not Father Villatoro in his freshly-dug grave. Not even that sick bastard Carillo, who was still stuck in exile, once again murdering people to try and win favor.
Out of the corner of his eye Mike saw his luggage. It was still unpacked in the corner of the room where it had lain since he came back to his mother’s house. He went over and opened the case on his bed. There it was. The simple, battered box that contained all the records of Natalia’s sad, murderous life. It was just a pile of random photos and papers now: the remnants that he did not give to Carver.