by Reed Karaim
“It’s what we do to keep from freezing to death,” Nathan said.
“Or going crazy,” Myra said. “Besides, he’s wrong all the time.”
“What? I’m wrong?” Nathan’s voice had a high New York twang. “You think this is a smoothly running show you’re seeing here? You think this is a Carnival cruise?”
“Oh God,” Myra said. “Yes, Nathan, I think this is The Love Boat.”
She looked up into the tumbling snow, laughing, and I remember everything so clearly: the mob of us in the dark; Crane down the sidewalk, head tilted to keep a cell phone dry, speaking into the distant sunshine of Hollywood as he desperately tried to turn the evening’s elation into more durable currency; Angela holding his free hand and listening to every word, calculating behind her smile; the Secret Service glancing nervously up and down the block; Duprey standing in the middle of the white street, light shining off his balding forehead, waiting for the uncertain caravan of our future to come clattering out of the dark.
Crane spent four frantic days making sure South Dakota didn’t slip away. He shook the hands of buzz-cut ranchers at the Sioux Falls stockyards, managed the Corn Palace with only the faintest smile, raced down highways drawn with a ruler to towns rising like islands in a winter sea. Behind the scenes all was chaos: the campaign was running on money borrowed on the flush of rising polls—only the ghost of a structure had been set up outside New Hampshire and Iowa—and suddenly offices were needed everywhere. We were late all the time and sometimes the rally was in a different restaurant and often the hotel clerk looked at us blankly when we stumbled in at two in the morning. When he was on the road with us, Blendin could be seen pacing like a bull in the lobby at the end of the day, compulsively picking more holes in his tattered sweatshirt as he shouted commands at newly recruited volunteers with the frenzy of a pyromaniac in charge of a fireworks display.
Crane flew out of Rapid City cursed with the title of front-runner. Wilson still had more money and the better organization, and both were expected to show themselves when we reached the great slew of southern primaries held on Super Tuesday. But first came primaries in Maryland, Colorado and Georgia. We traveled through a blur of hotels and airports and rallies. The peaks of Colorado slid past the plane windows and the hills of New Hampshire seemed a distant memory. The pine trees in Georgia rocked in a sullen breeze and the arctic stillness of South Dakota seemed to belong to another life. Then the wind blew ice into our eyelashes in Maryland and we’d circuited the seasons in a week. Myra stood in the sleet in a light jacket with quilted swans parading across the back, imploring the heavens: “I give up. I’m out of clothes. You’ve beaten me. Where next, Alaska?”
The campaign was swollen by success, requiring a full-size jet, a bus, limousines, vans. We traveled in motorcades and took over entire floors of hotels. At rallies a host of starry-eyed volunteers appeared to push and prod us in the right direction. So in late winter the world in which I would live for so long took final form: a world of hotels and airplanes and buses, crowds and deserted tarmacs late at night and unknown cities on the horizon distant and obscure, an artificial but strangely intimate community of reporters and staff and Secret Service agents, all pressed together, watching America pass through smudged glass, hearing it in a thousand interrupted conversations, wondering always what was in its heart.
We were in Baltimore and I had finished a long night working on a setup piece when I ran into Steven Duprey at a bar down the street from the hotel.
“Hiding out?”
He gestured to a spot beside him. “Not any longer, I guess.”
We had known each other since Blendin & Duprey handled a Montana senate race four years earlier. We’d gotten along well from the beginning. We both came from small western cities, the same kind of place, even if separated by two thousand miles, and we liked each other in the quiet, unstated fashion that exists between Westerners.
“I’ll buy you a drink,” I said.
“Only if you don’t expect me to say anything newsworthy in return. It’s been a long, hard day.”
I signaled the bartender. “How’s Susan?” His wife was five months’ pregnant.
“Still throwing up every morning.”
“So being on the road isn’t all bad?”
His gentle smile escaped through his beard. He raised his glass. “To my lovely and very patient wife.”
We drank quietly for a while. The bar was almost deserted.
“There’s a stupid little thing I’ve been meaning to ask you about,” I said.
Duprey sipped his beer. “Stupid little things are my life. Shoot.”
“You ever know your man to go through periods of self-doubt? I mean, about his political career?”
He set down the bottle. “Self-doubt? Come on, Cliff. What’s the next question, the real question?”
I raised my hand in a gesture of peace. “When he was first asked to run for the House and the Senate, he went back home and spent a week making up his mind. It just struck me as interesting. I wondered if you knew why.”
Duprey was dressed in the cowboy boots and jeans jacket he always wore on the road—the perfect disguise, a genuine part of himself that had nothing at all to do with what he had become. He was working now, sipping his beer while he tried to decide if he needed to be worried about this conversation.
“You doing another profile?”
“Updating an old one for the future. I was just going through old notes when it struck me as curious.”
He shrugged. “We didn’t do his House races. You and I were probably in high school during the first one. I came on board for his second Senate race. I don’t remember him saying a thing. Why don’t you ask him?”
I gestured to the bartender for another round.
“I’ll have to do that. It’s probably nothing.”
The bartender handed us our beers and Steven paid.
“So you and Robin getting along all right?” he asked.
“We’ve only seen each other a couple of times. But sure. Very professional relationship.”
“Cold?”
“I didn’t mean it that way. We’re getting along fine. Friends.”
“Good. You know she’s doing a great job. They promoted her a couple of days ago. Assistant policy director. She flew in last night. You’ll see her on the plane a lot more often. She’s working her buns off, learning about everything, and we need someone like that on the road.”
“Great,” I said. “That’ll make her happy.”
“She deserves it.”
Through the window you could see the shadow of Camden Yards squatting along the horizon. The streets were empty.
“When did you first introduce me to her?” he asked. “In Washington someplace?”
“A reception . . . in the Interior Committee room, I think. I can’t remember why we were there.”
Duprey smiled. “Probably something of tremendous importance at the time. Probably all over the front pages.”
“Probably.”
“Well, always a pretty woman, and smart.”
“True enough.”
He hesitated. Decided he knew me well enough, I guess.
“She ever marry that photographer?”
“I don’t think so.”
He rocked his empty bottle gently on the bar, the sound like the amplified roll of a coin settling in place.
“You’ll probably be seeing a lot of each other.”
I tipped my beer back and swallowed.
“We promise not to pull each other’s hair in public.”
He looked at his hands.
“Did it ever occur to you that politics is just junior high in suits and ties?”
“Finally, Steven, a quote I can use.”
He smiled. “Which means I better call it a night. You know how it is, tomorrow is always another day.”
I watched him leave. The question about Crane had been handled badly, probably a stupid idea from the beginning. But for tw
o weeks I had pondered, turned things over in my head, and done nothing. It wasn’t like me. I knew my own weaknesses as a reporter and hesitation had never been one of them. Uncertainty, yes, but never hesitation.
Duprey wouldn’t bother Crane about it anyway. Consultants were like lawyers. They never pressed their clients about anything that might bring complicated news.
The bartender swabbed around my beer. “We’re closing up soon, sir. Last call if you want one for the road.”
I looked at the beer in the bottom of my bottle and stopped pretending I was thinking about my job. Robin would be traveling with us. I’d known all along it was just a matter of time.
The next morning I woke early and stood in the hotel window staring at Baltimore’s inner harbor fifteen stories below. The USS Constellation, the old clipper ship, bobbed along the boardwalk, masts swinging like tired metronomes. Farther down the dock, the National Aquarium melted into the fog, cubist and cold.
Another morning, another hotel room, the depressing familiarity of the unfamiliar. I stumbled through my rituals. I took the battery that had charged overnight out of my computer and replaced it with the backup, to charge until the last minute. I sat on the edge of the bed and discarded old campaign schedules, briefing papers, press releases and torn newspaper clippings from my Lands’ End bag. I checked the cell phone in the bathroom, plugged in beside my shaving kit as it always was, to make sure it had charged.
All this done, I sat on the edge of the bed in my underwear. I had another hour I could sleep, precious time on the road, but I knew her habits too well. I shaved and showered and packed my garment bag, leaving it outside the door of my room with the campaign tags on it. Someone would be along to pick it up at seven and transport it to the plane, or so they always promised.
The hallway was quiet, the restaurant downstairs empty. I ordered coffee and a sweet roll and sat at a table in the lobby reading the Sun and the Post. The papers were already looking ahead to Super Tuesday. Crane was behind almost everywhere in the South, but closing in fast in Missouri and Kentucky. I read and, after a while, as I knew she would, Robin came in from running, wearing smudged gray sweats from the University of Montana and breathing hard. A thin trickle of sweat slid from her pulled-back hair down her temple and past one pink, translucent ear.
“You’re still running,” I said.
She stopped and glanced around the empty lobby. “And what are you doing?”
“Still not sleeping.”
Robin hesitated, then took a deep breath and sat down at my table.
“Well, it’s good to know that wasn’t my fault.”
“Not for a while anyway.”
“Very funny. Can I have a sip?” She slid my Styrofoam coffee cup her way.
“Of course.”
She sipped the coffee, wiped her forehead with a sleeve, and shuffled her feet across the carpet. Her eyes wandered to the newspaper and around the room, taking everything in.
“Congratulations on the promotion,” I said. “Welcome aboard.”
She tried, but could not stifle her satisfaction. “Thanks.”
Robin leaned back in the seat. Her breathing slowed, raising and lowering the delicate bones of her shoulders and the swell of her breasts.
“What else you doing? Still reading a lot of history?”
“Some.”
“Still the Civil War?”
“Sure, but don’t worry. I’m not going to turn into one of those guys who dresses up and marches around in a field on weekends, shooting a musket at strangers.”
She looked into the coffee cup, a wry and then slightly sad light in her eyes.
“No,” she said. “You never were a joiner.”
The first bedraggled volunteers were arriving in the lobby, bleary-eyed, clothes twisted, unbuttoned and wrinkled. Robin watched them gather around Aaron Siegel, the road manager.
“It’s been wild in Springfield,” she said. “We started out with almost nobody and now we’ve got people bumping into each other. We’re setting up a computer system so we can respond to any claim by our opponents within the same news cycle. All Crane’s votes and everything he’s ever said that we can get our hands on is being entered into the system. We’ve got kids working all night long.”
She smiled at me, wanting to share the joy she felt.
“How about you? Has it been fun?”
“The ‘Cornheads for Crane’ buttons in Iowa were fun,” I said. “And there was this supporter of yours in Bedford, New Hampshire, who put up a hot air balloon the night before the election. He had an electric sign hanging beneath it, but one of the letters blinked out. ‘WE WANT RANE!’ it said. That was fun.”
She smiled again, offered me the coffee cup. I shook my head and she drained it.
“Think how proud your father would be if he knew you were doing all this.”
I thought of my father in his shoe-box office with sunbleached books and newspapers piled up to the ceiling. He worked until his heart gave out, toppling forward in the print shop when, despite the doctor’s warnings, he insisted on lifting bundles of his newspaper onto the truck for delivery just as he’d done for thirty-five years. He’d never cared for smart-ass features, the ironic tone, and the concluding editorial judgment that have become the staples of his trade.
“He was pretty old-fashioned,” I said lightly. “I don’t know what he’d think of the stories we write today, laying the candidates out on a psychiatrist’s couch, doing features about their pets.”
“Crane’s dog is named Rex. Got a feature coming?”
“I know its name, and it’s probably only a matter of time.”
Robin watched the lobby slowly filling up with people.
“Do you think he can do it?” she said.
“I don’t know. Nobody thought he’d get this far. He’s going to get hammered down south. But maybe. Who knows?”
“You’re always so careful, Cliff.”
The old differences glimmered up out of the past like a snakeskin in the sunlit grass. We watched to see if it moved.
“I always thought thoughtful might be a fairer word,” I said.
A curled strand had fallen from behind Robin’s ear and wrapped itself underneath her chin. She wove it back into place, gold on gold.
“I don’t think so, but maybe.”
“Maybe thoughtful?”
“Maybe thoughtful or careful wasn’t what I needed then.”
She squeezed my hand across the table, cool fingers sliding up the back of my hand.
“Oh, I don’t know, Cliff. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe I was crazy. Maybe we both were. Maybe it wasn’t ever meant to be. Maybe we screwed up. Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe maybe maybe. But ahh me, this is no longer necessary.”
She laughed, embarrassed, and stood up. She bent and touched her toes quickly, then stretched as if just getting out of bed, arms wide, small fists curled.
“Anyway, he’s got to do it. And I’ve got to shower. You know what they say. Miss the bus and you miss the day.”
“I’ll see you later,” I said.
She smiled. “That’s right. You will.”
When she had gone, I bought myself another coffee and settled at the same table. Other reporters drifted down, hair still damp, eyes puffy, skin pale. We had a long way to go and I wondered what we would look like at the end. The coffee burnt my tongue and I set it down. Ahh me, this is no longer necessary. That was something her mother used to say, usually when discussing Robin’s haunted, ruined father. Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore. I wanted to believe that more than I could say. But I knew it wasn’t true. If there was one lesson in our history, it was that the past always, inescapably, and forever matters.
IX.
EARLY ON a December morning Robin is riding a horse along the Yellowstone River. The hills she has known all her life are white and brown. She crests a ridge and the river glimmers below like a bent tongue of silver. She sees the ghost of the moon and the last stain of nig
ht in the folds between the mountains. Standing in the stirrups, she takes a deep breath, and as she exhales and fog rises in her vision in a curtain, she lets her eyes fall to the huge white house on the river.
She stays for less than a minute, and when she tells me about it that evening, her voice is so flattened out I am not sure how much it means until I see her small hands, balled up into fists that rest in her lap like stones.
I have been a journalist long enough to know that you can tell any story countless ways. This could be a story of two people who misperceived strength, it could be a story of the misplaced faith humans have in the redemptive possibility of change, it could be a story of the seductive power of an aggrieved sense of injustice, how the crusade leeches simpler pleasures out of the crusader. All these things are true, and the lessons can be taken in such abstract terms if you wish. The world seems to need morals these days and so I give you these.
But we were a skinny son of Irishmen and a skinnier daughter of old Scots, and we lived beneath any larger point the way we lived beneath the sweaters and parkas that swaddled us through the Montana winter. I am telling you about the only person I have ever loved, and to me we are a tangle of arms and legs, the brush of a wordless tongue against a roaring ear, and to me this story is in those hands.
It begins not with the pampered child who once rode a pony out from that house, but with her father. He was the son of a rancher who hated horses and spent thirty years working for the U.S. Forest Service. Robin’s family moved twice as he slid up the bureaucracy, living in Washington for a year when she was an infant, and in Arkansas when she was in junior high, but always returning to Montana. Her father had been a blandly successful careerist, his political beliefs safely stapled shut for decades, by the time he ascended to the regional director’s post. The position made him one of the most prominent federal officials in Montana. He was an old-fashioned forest man who accepted the need for logging, who enjoyed hunting and fishing, and who had no time for city folk who believed the American wilderness was a fragile garden to be preserved untouched. I can’t imagine the men in charge thought they were going to have any trouble with him.