If Men Were Angels

by Reed Karaim

The hotel was old enough that the window opened. I yanked it up and the damp night air flooded in, brushing the curtains back. The noise from the party came in louder. Another sound came from the street, faint and struggling to be heard. I leaned forward and followed it down to the sidewalk. Five figures passed from circle of light to circle of light, carrying signs on their shoulders. A curled red splotch on the signs. Their voices floated in a singsong: “Crane the Killer. Crane the Killer. Crane the Killer.”

  I watched them for a while and then I pulled the window closed and sat down on the edge of the bed. I had to plug in my equipment. I had to pull out tomorrow’s clothes. We were leaving at nine, but I was too tired to move.

  Crane the Killer. Crane the Liar. We were all out for him now.

  XII.

  WE FLEW north and the primaries melted into one another. Michigan, Illinois, Connecticut, New York. Crane did not win everywhere, but he won often enough that the result was never in doubt, although we spun endless fantasies in print and on videotape pretending otherwise. The protesters I heard that night in Kentucky were with us from then on, not always, but every few days, floating at the edge of our consciousness like a troubling, half-formed thought that recedes as you pursue it, but refuses to disappear.

  So March passed and April bloomed on Lexington Avenue with Crane standing on a flatbed truck while faces appeared in window after window, a crowd terraced above us, leaning forward to catch snatches of his words rising on a spring breeze. When he spoke, laughter, applause, smiles rippled from the street up into mirrored reflections of the city, and in their warmth, the long winter was somehow banished.

  We slid into May and I saw Robin often when we were both on the road. I took days off and she went back to Springfield for as long as a week at a time, but when we were traveling we talked and sometimes we had breakfast together. We talked about Billings, but never about those awkward, final months in Washington. Our conversations were full of the ever-exploding present. There were strained moments, of course, when we got too close to the past, and then she was too busy to see me for a few days, but they were rare. I look back and it seems we talked mostly about nothing at all, and I realize how essential that was, how much we needed a gentle changing of the seasons.

  I got up in the morning and left my bags outside my door and got on a bus and went where they took me and wrote what other people asked me to and I never did a thing about what Latrelle Gregory had told me until one day John Starke leaned over and said, “The senator would like to talk to you.”

  We were on the plane. Starke’s fine hair was cropped close and brushed back above his pink forehead. Light from the window caught his ear and I noticed the waxy stubble of just-clipped ear hair.

  “The senator wants to see me?”

  He nodded and smiled, as always, with less joy than anyone I’ve ever seen. “If you’ve got a moment.”

  I found my tape recorder and notebook and stood up. Our assigned seats were two to a row, the middle seat left empty. Nathan sat next to me. He stood up to let me out, his eyes bright with curiosity.

  “Tell him I’ll be in next,” he said.

  “Sure you will,” Starke said.

  I stood in the aisle trying to get my bearings—fifteen seconds earlier I had been slumped against the bulkhead with my eyes closed. The press section of the plane slid slowly into focus with the reassuring familiarity of home: the torn-out pictures and headlines pasted on the walls, the odors of sweat, half a dozen meals, spilled soft drinks, dirty bathrooms and greasy luggage. Taped to the bulkhead by my seat was a picture of the vice president of the United States visiting one of our proxy guerrilla armies in Central America. He was posing ferociously with a grenade launcher, holding it backward so it pointed at his shoulder. I stared at it until my head cleared while Starke waited impatiently.

  “Just preparing a brutal chain of questions,” I said.

  He led me through the galley and into the front of the plane. One of the flight attendants winked at me as I passed, as if to say, aren’t you a lucky boy. My eyes strayed to Robin’s seat when I entered, but she was in California preparing for our arrival.

  Crane had his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up one crisp turn. He sat in one of a set of seats facing each other. He had the table down between them and in his right hand he held a small book with covers of worn and cracked black leather. He smiled when he saw me.

  “Cliff, sit down.” He gestured to the seat across from him. “I wanted you to see this. A man who read your article about my reading habits gave it to me.”

  He handed the book to me. The covers gave beneath my fingers, as soft as old cotton.

  “It’s an edition of Grant’s memoirs,” he said. “Published in eighteen ninety-four.”

  I turned the translucent pages carefully and read: My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral. The words were full of an unexpected resonance, and I hovered over them uncertainly.

  Crane watched me carefully. “So, have you gotten to Galena yet?”

  I shook my head.

  He seemed mildly, but genuinely disappointed. “You should try if you get a chance. Did I tell you they’ve got the family home restored and a great exhibit at the museum? A nice piece of history. They’re very proud of the whole thing.”

  “I’ve read this,” I said. “It’s a great book.”

  He nodded with boyish enthusiasm. “He was a beautiful writer.”

  “Of course, there are those who say Mark Twain wrote most of it.”

  He considered me with those eyes and I watched a reappearance of the quietly haughty candidate I had glimpsed before.

  “Yes. Every time a politician opens his mouth, there’s someone who looks behind the curtain to see who’s pulling the strings. Yet somehow we remain creatures of free will.”

  The conversation seemed to be teetering on a fence, capable of falling in either direction. Crane looked over my shoulder.

  “I’ve been thinking about something you asked me a while back. You asked me about my mother’s death and I said something like, ‘It was hard. You have to make choices.’ I regretted that after I said it. I thought it sounded hard . . . harsh.”

  I had set the book on the table. He picked it up and stared at the cover.

  “I don’t know if you remember that conversation, but I wanted to correct it. I don’t know that there were that many choices. I had plans, and I knew she wanted me to accomplish them as much as anyone. They were her dreams, too. She deserves more credit than I gave her, than she’s ever gotten.”

  He paused. I could feel Starke hovering behind my shoulder, hating the direction of this conversation.

  “I know you were close,” I said.

  Crane shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

  “There is all this stuff written about me these days,” he said, “and I have yet to see a story that gets this right, that gives her the credit she deserves. She had a sense of larger things. That wasn’t that common. At least in Berthold.”

  His tone was strangely aggrieved, defensive. His fingers slid absently along his temple.

  “It wasn’t always easy, but without those goals, who knows where I’d be? That’s what I wanted to say.”

  I nodded. Starke shifted behind me, and I thought I was about to be dismissed.

  “I remember you told me once you grew up in a small town,” Crane said.

  “Havre. It’s a small city in Montana.”

  “I thought maybe it wasn’t so different.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Are your parents still alive?”

  “My mother. My father died a few years ago.”

  “I remember you told me that the same morning. What did he do?”

  “He was a newspaper editor.”

  He smiled at me, as if clearly apprehending something he had only sensed obscurely before.

  “I bet you made him proud.”

  “He died before I got to Washington,” I sai
d.

  “So did she.”

  My ears popped. We were descending. I heard Starke clear his throat. I knew this was the time to ask Crane about the thing that had been bothering me, to point out gently that he could not have visited his brother when he said, to ask him about the sudden trip to Berthold, to ask him what kept bringing him back. I knew this was my chance.

  “Thanks for letting me see the book,” I said.

  Crane slid the book across the table.

  “Take it with you for a while, Cliff. You can give it to John when you’re done.”

  “I wouldn’t dare.” I nodded toward the back of the plane. “It’s like bringing china into a zoo.”

  Starke snorted with satisfaction. Crane grinned. “Remember you said that, not me. I hope we can talk more about Grant later.”

  Myra’s seat was directly in front of mine. When I got back she propped her arms on top of the row, resting her chin in her hands, examining me with a mocking look of astonishment. I felt Nathan twisting in his seat.

  “So?” she said.

  There is a protocol among reporters on the campaign trail. Words said in public by the candidate are shared by everyone. Words said in a private interview are your own. She was asking if I had anything I wanted to share.

  “So nothing,” I said. “He had an old book he wanted to show me. We had a discussion once about history.”

  She cocked an eyebrow as if I had just admitted I was building a time machine in my basement.

  “And?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

  I looked out the window at a patchwork of gold-and-brown hills rising to meet us. I heard Myra settle back in her seat. The day was full of the saffron light of the West Coast, still the light of eternal promise. I thought about my father. When I was young he never explained the point of his work to me that I can remember, but once. We were standing near the railroad tracks that divide Havre into rich and poor, white and Indian. He had written a story that traced the last hours of a carful of high school students who killed themselves in an accident coming down the road from the Rocky Boy Reservation. It was an annual spring rite in Havre, the graduation party at the reservation, where the police had no jurisdiction, followed too often by the death of a carful of teenagers on the way home.

  My father had written about the three girls in the car and the two days of drinking that preceded the accident. They were all popular, all from well-to-do families, and the community was furious. We were walking near the tracks and the mother of one of the girls saw us. “Lying bastard!” she shouted and crossed the street to avoid him. I was twelve years old and I was mortified and then full of self-righteous rage.

  “Those girls were just what you said,” I told my father. “Just what you said.”

  He was a gentle, easily distracted man by then, who wore old corduroy pants that rustled when he walked, so he always seemed to be having a murmured conversation with himself. He looked at me through his glasses with watery eyes, and I saw that I had hurt him. “I never said they were anything,” he said.

  He walked another few feet and stopped again. “Most people never look at the world the way it is, just the way they want it to be. That’s a nice way to live, Cliff. You want to live that way you go work in a university.” He looked across the street at the disappearing back of the mother. “I never said those girls were anything. I reported the evidence. I just reported what they did.”

  It was an old-fashioned creed even then, many would say based on a simplistic notion of the truth, as if the truth can be assembled from the physical detritus of our lives, as if we are the muddy footprint on the carpet, the smiling face bent toward the makeup mirror, the offhand remark in the hallway. Who is to say any of this is truth?

  Nonetheless, I don’t know of any other creed for a journalist that starts in humility and proceeds without bitterness. I know of no other way we can operate without committing greater sins of arrogance and presumption. Maybe it is a frail and incomplete faith, but what else do we have? I had raised this tattered pennant through all my defeats, all my thirty-three years of small failure and paltry evasion: I had never been afraid to gather the evidence. I had never been afraid to ask the question.

  We banked through reefs of sunlight and landed at John Wayne International Airport. While we were waiting for the bus, I walked far enough away from the plane to escape the noise. I stood on the shimmering tarmac, thinking about Thomas Crane and his mother and my father and small places where dreams are all about the things you will do when you leave. I thought about how I liked him and how I knew he liked me and then I tugged my phone out of my bag. My editor answered on the first ring.

  “When I get back to town, remind me,” I said, “there’s something I’ve got to talk to you about. It’s probably nothing, but I need help checking it out.”

  XIII.

  IN CALIFORNIA, where the sun sets on the primary season, we filed early to meet East Coast deadlines, and the night stretched before us like a sudden holiday. I don’t know San Francisco well, but we were near the Embarcadero Center in a beautiful hotel with rooms of Japanese simplicity, silk prints on eggshell walls, lacquered woodwork shining like obsidian. Chinatown and North Beach were somewhere above us. We climbed a hill and chose a restaurant where the drawn red carcasses of ducks hung by their necks in the window and the smells of ginger and garlic drifted out of the open door.

  We sat at a huge table with a dolly in the center, sharing heaping platters of Kung Pao chicken, sweet and sour pork, Szechuan vegetables, shredded beef in garlic. We’d been living for months on sandwiches tossed into the plane and Mexican food served from press-room buffets, and a bottomless hunger had seized us all.

  “More of these,” Nathan yelled, holding up a plate of prawns. “And another round of beer.”

  Myra stared through a beer bottle, sloshing it back and forth, the muscles in her face slowly relaxing.

  “You wouldn’t think he could put that much down, would you? I guess it feeds his twitches.”

  “Little guys always eat a lot,” said Randall Craig, CNN’s correspondent. “Haven’t you noticed?”

  Craig was smooth and suntanned, with heavily lidded eyes, delicate wrists and long fingers. He had a precise, European way of speaking picked up in a bureau overseas, only rarely betrayed by the vestiges of a Brooklyn accent. His hair was a remarkable ornament, silver and black, sweeping back into a widow’s peak like the beak of a hawk. He was eternally bored and always seemed to be having a splendid time.

  “I’m a high-energy guy,” Nathan said. “Never gain a pound. Never run, never lift weights, never do anything. Type real fast.”

  “Verbal calisthenics, you may be an Olympian,” Stuart said, sipping a glass of wine and pursing his lips as if there were ashes at the bottom. The happiness of others worked on him that way.

  Steven Duprey’s face disappeared and reappeared between decanters of soy sauce and bowls of peppers. A paternal smile parted his beard. Those of us in the press had been articles to be managed, handled, massaged for months, and now, at least temporarily, we could do no more damage. He watched us with the pride of a parent whose children have learned enough to be taken to a nice restaurant.

  A round-faced aide sitting next to him waved a bottle of beer above his head.

  “The spoils of victory! Enjoy! Enjoy! Enjoy!”

  Randall Craig raised his glass and nodded at Duprey. “To victory. Who would have thought it possible?”

  “I believe I predicted it from the beginning,” Nathan said with his mouth full.

  “You predicted everything from the beginning,” Myra said. “You were bound to be right sooner or later.”

  “An amazing campaign,” Craig said. “Brilliant and, of course, luckier than God.”

  Duprey raised his beer. “To being luckier than God. The key to political genius.”

  “No false modesty, Duprey,” Myra said
. “It doesn’t suit you.”

  Steven’s half-moon of forehead seemed to be grinning with reflected light.

  “Didn’t I just call myself a genius?”

  Nathan lifted a dripping forkful of broccoli to his mouth.

  “You want to know genius? Those public forums are genius. That speech in Colorado where he promised to clean up Rocky Flats if it takes a thousand years—that was genius.”

  “If you want genius in this campaign, there’s one place you find it,” Craig said. “The first debate. When the Reverend stood up and Crane welcomed him to the stage.”

  “He does rise to the occasion, doesn’t he?” Duprey said.

  Stuart sourly swallowed the last of his wine. “You’d hardly think it possible.”

  Duprey smiled mildly. “There are worse things in politics or life than being underestimated.”

  “Let us give credit where credit is due,” Craig said. “It isn’t often that a politician comes along who remakes the rules, but Crane may be one of those men.”

  The round-faced aide waved his bottle. “Hear! Hear!”

  Craig had a smile that appeared like the suddenly white underside of a fish. “And that doesn’t mean we won’t do our best to drag him back to earth with the rest of us.”

  Duprey raised his beer. “Hear, hear.”

  A cigarette wraith of a woman, with jet-black hair cut in a severe bob and lipstick the color of dried blood, slid up to the table. She was Randall Craig’s producer, but she ignored his gesture toward an open seat and stood until we all stopped and looked at her.

  “ABC’s running another overnight on Crane versus the president,” she said. “I called a friend to get the prelims.”

  We waited while she enjoyed her moment on stage.

  “Crane, thirty-nine,” she said. “The current president of the United States, thirty-eight, a virtual tie—”

  “Ohh yeaahh!”

  The aide’s hands shot into the air and beer poured down his arm. A waiter came hurrying from the corner of the room.

  “It’s nothing,” Myra said. “Our friend is celebrating his future seat in the cabinet.”