Mid-Life Friends and Illusions

by Jeffrey Freeman

  While he was idling, he checked the sky. Clear blue, not a cloud in any direction. Weather did not seem to be the cause of the static.

  “We should probably take another look at Miss Ware’s pedigree,” Samuel suggested.

  Static. “On it, Chief.”

  “When was the last time you touched base with your buddies at the FBI?”

  The only response was a long interval of static.

  “Howard? Howard, are you there?”

  Static and then, “here, Chief.”

  “Did you catch my last transmission?”

  “You are breaking up pretty bad but, yes. First (static) morning.”

  Samuel had time to himself to think on the hour-long trek to the airport. The rental car people were glad to see him return it early. There was never an abundance of cars on their lot. Vermont frugality dictated that they tried to have enough rentals available but not so many that they would be sitting there a long while not producing revenue. They were quick to out-process Samuel to his waiting ride.

  Samuel’s face betrayed his misgivings. Before his door on the pickup closed, Ed asked, “You all right?”

  Samuel nodded perfunctorily.

  The pickup pulled away from the airport parking lot. “We got time,” Ed said. “Only take ten minutes ta git there.”

  “Not sure I want to.” Samuel’s words came out minus any emotion.

  Ed pulled the pickup to the side of the road and waited.

  Finally Samuel spoke. “Not sure I can do this. Maybe it would be better all around if I just quit. Let Jack Thomas have his run at it.”

  “This got somethin’ ta do with Jane makin’ a appointment with a lawyer?” Ed asked.

  Samuel casually turned to look at him.

  “She asked me fur a name. Who I thought best,” Ed admitted.

  “I guess. More with Sara. I don’t want her hurt any more. Dragged through, whatever.”

  “Sara? What’s Sara got ta do with it?”

  Samuel froze. He had forgotten that Ed didn’t know anything about the other incident with George, Sara’s reasoning for the shooting. His father’s admonition tightened his jaw. His clenched mouth made his words come out angrier than he intended. “You know how these campaigns can get, especially in the last weeks.” He held his jaw with his right hand, thumb along the cheek, forefinger against his lips; a reminder to himself of Sara’s kiss but without significance to Ed.

  “You think Thomas’s folks would pull some kinda dirty trick on Sara?” Ed asked incredulously.

  “You never know. I don’t want to take a chance. We’re just beginning to connect again.” The scowl on Samuel’s face conveyed his sincerity.

  Ed thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Aye don’t see it. Jane, divorce, they git wind a that, I kin see that. But what dirt could they have on Sara?”

  “Who cares! They’ll just make something up!” Samuel slammed the dashboard with his open hand hard enough to startle Ed.

  “Sam, I ain’t nevah seen you this worked up ovah anythin’. If you want ta call it quits, that’s fine by me. But what about them otha folks? The ones that believe in you, trust you. Put their money, and their time, where their mouths are. What about them? They ain’t nevah gonna forget. Don’t ya think ya owe somethin’?”

  Samuel closed his hands in his lap, dropped his head, eyes closed, took a deep breath. Three hundred thousand voters, give or take, was a lot of people to have angry at you. Having any kind of political or business life in the state if he just walked away would be nearly impossible.

  “You’re right,” he said resignedly.

  Ed pulled back into traffic. “This interview fella’s a piece a cake. Promised me nuthin’ but puff-ball questions.”

  Samuel nodded, hardly hearing or caring.

  The twenty-minute interview was winding down. It had gone just as Ed predicted. Then in the last three minutes, the interviewer asked, “So, Samuel, what about the large amount of cash they found at the railway station?” He glanced at his notes. “Nearly sixty-thousand dollars I believe.”

  Samuel shot a quick glance at Ed on the other side of the glass booth. “What about it?” Samuel responded without thinking, caught off-guard.

  “Well, didn’t they find some of your campaign literature in with the money?”

  “So I heard.”

  “Well, how do you explain that?”

  “I don’t. That’s the sheriff’s job. As far as I know, it has nothing to do with me. Unless of course, someone is trying to smear my reputation just before the election.”

  “I see. Well, I suppose that could be an explanation. What about your connection to Walter Bensen?”

  Samuel shot an angry look at Ed. Someone had fed this man close-hold information, either intentionally or unintentionally. Samuel’s adrenalin kicked in, made him focus, re-lit the political fire. His words came out confident, strong, without rancor. “Walter has interests in building light, high-speed rail in Florida. He asked me to consider his position.”

  “By flying you down to his corporate offices in Houston, Texas?”

  “If you are asking, did I accept financial favors from a man interested in securing my vote, then the answer is, ‘no.’ I paid for that trip. And before you ask, no, the money did not come from government funds or from my campaign contributions. It came out of my own pocket.”

  The irritation creeping into Samuel’s voice wasn’t lost on the interviewer who smiled as he prefaced the next question. “Well, we all know that the rail office in your hometown of St. Pierre controls rail traffic on some five-thousand miles of track from the Canadian border to Florida. There’s nothing wrong with bringing a little pork home.”

  Samuel cut him off before the question could be asked. “I am also meeting with all other interested parties concerning high-speed rail in Florida. That’s part of my job as a member of the Transportation Subcommittee. As for any pork, if it ever gets built and if there is a contract put out to bid, then the St. Pierre office may bid on it if they chose to. There won’t be any favoritism in any bill that I have anything to do with. That’s the way Vermonters are—fair and above board.”

  At the moment the words spilled out of his mouth, he believed them. But he knew that people around the world operate in their own best self-interest. It would be in his self-interest to bring some pork to St. Pierre. If there was a legitimate way to load the dice down the road in St. Pierre’s favor, he’d find it.

  The interviewer swallowed, checked his notes. “Well, what about this car accident you were involved in recently?”

  “Good grief!” Samuel exclaimed. “I thought we were hear to discuss serious issues facing Vermonters. Taxes. Unemployment. Healthcare. You must be from Florida if you think a car sliding off the road in wet snow is news.”

  The producer next to Ed chuckled behind the glass, twirled his finger, a sign to the interviewer to wrap it up.

  “Well, that’s about all the time we have. My guest today has been Senator Samuel Winters. I’m Cam Pearlman and you’ve been listening to ‘Vermont Weekend.’” Luckily for the interviewer his red face couldn’t be seen on radio.

  Samuel waited for the red-lit “On Air” sign to go dark. He shoved the chair away from the microphone and stood up. Pearlman scrambled to his feet and stuck out his hand.

  “Thanks for coming, Senator,” he said, smiling.

  It had been a trying couple of days. Samuel’s desire to respond candidly to the trivial interrogation was strong. He wanted to say, “Blow it out your ass.” Instead, he just looked at the protruding hand, skipped the obligatory politician smile, and walked away. Years of hearing stories of faux pas committed when supposedly dead microphones were actually still live made him err on the side of caution. The unshaken hand, however, was a clear expression of his feelings and not subject to recording.

  Back in the pickup on the road to Rutland, Samuel said, “If that was your idea of puff-balls, I can hardly wait for the book club ladies.”
r />   “Jesus, Sam, I don’t know where he came up with all that,” Ed said.

  “These ladies better be asking why Jane’s middle name is Austen or you and I will be having a serious talk.”

  “Gawd, Sam, you don’t think I had anythin’ ta do with that do ya?”

  Silence.

  “Jeez,” Ed mused, “Aye hope none of them Amvets ruffle your feathas.”

  “Drive.”

  The road noise of the winter tires on dry pavement passed for conversation on the remainder of the trip.

  The book club ladies proved congenial. They did indeed politely ask about Jane’s middle name, even though they all knew the story. They asked what books was she reading, did he read much for pleasure, and did he enjoy Washington. When one of the younger women asked his opinion on Obamacare, the whole group listened intently to Samuel’s answer. These were thinking voters, Samuel surmised, not just literary aficionados.

  The two-lane drive over the mountains to Montpelier transitioned from icily quiet to quietly pleasant. It’s not easy to drive west to east, or vice versa, in Vermont. The mountains and the Interstates run south to north. In a pickup truck, the fifty-mile per hour speed limit, less on many corners, is the maximum safely navigated on much of the road. The ride gave Samuel time to think, time to slough off many of the weekend’s inequities. On the way down the far side of the mountain, his thoughts turned to Howard and Beth.

  The Amvets dinner started with a cash bar at five p.m. on the dot. Samuel abstained, as was his custom at public events. It was never good politics to be photographed with alcohol. Everyone there wanted a picture with the senator. It wouldn’t be long, Samuel assumed, before some of those pictures made it to social media websites.

  So he smiled, he joked, he conversed lightly and seriously. It seemed Ed’s prayer, rather hope, had been answered. Then, as he was talking with three gray-bearded Vietnam vets, his cell phone vibrated in his pants. He kept the conversation going as he tried to discretely read the caller ID. “Excuse me a minute,” he said apologetically and stepped aside to answer it more privately.

  “What’s up?” Samuel whispered into the phone.

  “Sara’s in the hospital,” came Jane’s reply.

  “What?” There was no whisper in his voice. Everyone turned to look. Ed walked toward him from across the room.

  “She took some pills, OD’ed. “Do you use …”

  Samuel pictured her reading the label on the prescription bottle. “Hydrocodone,” he said. “Which hospital?”

  “Burlington.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Problem?” Ed asked.

  “Sara,” Samuel replied. He raised his voice somewhat, loud enough to be heard by most of the crowd but still carry a concerned pitch. “Gentlemen, I’m sorry. My daughter’s had some sort of accident. I hope you’ll understand. We’ll try to re-schedule.”

  There were murmurs of, “Shure,” “Got ta go,” and “Ayaught” from the group. One man shouted out, “Give ‘em hell in Washington.” Smiles and chuckles momentarily supplanted the concerned looks all around the room. It seemed to be a popular expression these days.

  Ed pulled the pickup to a stop in front of the main entrance. Samuel hardly noticed the photographer’s flash as he sprang up the two steps.

  It hit him the moment Samuel pushed open the hospital main entrance door—the smell, the distinct odor of hospital disinfectant. It wasn’t the off-pine scent of his mother’s disinfectant. It was the hospital smell, everyone the same, like death fragilely masked by a delusory vapor. He stopped at the admitting desk only long enough to ask for Sara’s room number.

  Ed caught up to Samuel in the first hallway. The smell in the scrubbed, white, lifeless corridors was stronger. It sent a shiver down Samuel’s spine, involuntarily causing his shoulders to hunch and his head to shake rapidly from side to side. He held his hand over his nose, providing an air filter of sorts. The shaking stopped. The smell did not appear to affect Ed in the slightest.

  They met Jane rounding the last corner before Sara’s room.

  “How is she?” Samuel asked, removing his hand from his nose.

  “Sleeping.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “The ladies room. I didn’t want to wake her.”

  She walked on. He covered his nose again. It took him only a few steps to stand at Sara’s door. Ed held back a step. Samuel gently pushed on the door, opening it as slowly and as quietly as possible.

  Sara, ashen-faced, eyes closed, looking frail, was propped against a pillow lying in the hospital bed. The smell was less strong in the room, mitigated by bed, chair, and bed sheets. He slowly removed his hand. The motion seemed to prompt her to open her eyes. He hesitated in the doorway before letting the door close behind him and sitting on the bed.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, searching her eyes for the truth.

  “I’m fine,” she replied weakly. “Just a little … they pumped my stomach. You know how much fun that is?”

  “You look like shit,” he said with a straight face.

  Half a laugh spilled out of her as she bent forward, grabbing her stomach in pain. She coughed a couple short breaths. “Not fair,” she smiled. Hearing her father cuss always delighted her. Samuel knew it.

  She eased back to an upright sitting position. He smiled. She wagged a warning finger at him not to make more jokes. “Mommy panicked.”

  “She does that when it comes to her only child.”

  “I wasn’t trying to do myself in.”

  “What did happen?”

  “I was just trying to stop the pain in my head. I couldn’t find any aspirin. I found your prescription. It said “for pain.”

  “Back pain. I’m not sure they’ll do anything for headaches.”

  “I wasn’t either. That’s why I took two.”

  “Two? Your mother said the bottle was empty.”

  “I took the bottle with me when I laid down to take a nap. I thought I might need more. I guess it spilled, dropped on the floor or something, when I dozed off.”

  “She said you’d been drinking.”

  “I had a glass of wine with lunch.”

  He said nothing but his look was interrogating.

  Every syllable came out slowly, distinctly, unapologetically. “I had half a tuna sandwich.”

  “So mommy saw the empty wine glass, the empty pill bottle…”

  Sara cut him off. “She didn’t even bother to look on the floor, under the bed, wherever, for the other pills.”

  Samuel nodded. “And she panicked.” He leaned forward and kissed her forehead. “She can be cool as a cucumber in the midst of a disaster, except when it comes to her only child.”

  “Ever think about having another one?” The words came out gruff tempered with humor. She smiled but stopped herself from laughing.

  “Thought about it. Thought better of it. We figured one of you was all we could handle.”

  She smiled but wagged her finger again. She looked like she needed a story.

  “Did I ever tell you about your great, great Uncle Guy?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, he was kind of different. Didn’t socialize much. He was a farmer, like your grandfather but what he really liked was hunting and trapping.”

  “How come I never heard of him?” she asked.

  “Like I said, he was kind of different. He wasn’t really a black sheep, just different. He went off once with some Indians up in Canada. Came back ten years later. Just as strong and tough as before but gentler somehow. Kinder.”

  “What happened? When he was with the Indians.”

  “He never said. But your grandmother told me that he seemed to have a special light in his eyes when he came back. She said her mother wondered once if she’d married the wrong brother after that.”

  “No, really?”

  “Other than his birth, you won’t find his name in the church records. Never went, at least not as an adult. But after
Canada, the Indians, folks thought he was spiritual somehow. That he could tell what folks were thinking just by looking into their eyes. Most folks avoided him, which suited Guy just fine. ‘Course I got all this third-hand so some of the facts might have been embellished just a tad.” Samuel smiled at her.

  “Good story, dad.” Her smile turned into a yawn.

  He gave her a light hug. “You mind if I send Ed in? I want to talk with the administrator, see if we can spring you from this place.”

  “Okay,” she said, nodding. “But just for a minute. I’m really sleepy.”

  Samuel rapped on the door marked, “Administrator.” He walked in before an invitation could be issued.

  “Mister Marsh?” Samuel asked from the doorway.

  The man behind the desk matched the corridors—neatly scrubbed and lifeless. He stood up, extending his hand. “Senator.” The greeting came from between thin lips. Even what passed for a smile was lifeless.

  Samuel tried to pump some warmth, some life, into the man with a handshake. The energy didn’t transmit. He sat opposite the desk. “About my daughter, Sara. We, my wife and I, we’d like to take her home.”

  “Yes,” Marsh replied slowly as he punched some keys on his computer. He took a moment to scan the screen. “The admitting doctor recommends keeping her here at least overnight for observation.”

  “I see.”

  “You’re welcome to speak with him, consult as it were. However, it’s a bit delicate as she is over eighteen. An adult. The privacy laws and all.” He scrolled to the next screen. He frowned. “The admitting record is incomplete. I thought she was over eighteen but there’s no birth date noted.”