The Governor's wife

by Mark Gimenez

  Those questions he asked himself. But the answer to each question was the same, and he already knew the answer: one day she would leave. About that he had no doubt. But there was one question that Jesse Rincon could not answer, a question that would not be answered until that day came, when the governor's wife left him: Was it truly better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?

  "Doctor?"

  His shoulders rose and fell with a deep breath. He turned and walked back to her.

  "Go home, Mrs. Bonner."

  He sat down behind his desk and began packing his bag.

  "But I thought-"

  "This is not a Junior League project, Mrs. Bonner. This is life on the border."

  "I'm not here for that. I'm here because I care."

  "About these poor people? Why?"

  "Because someone has to."

  "I do."

  "You can't do this by yourself."

  "I have for five years."

  "I can help you."

  "For how long? A day? A week? Maybe a month? Then the stink and the dirt and the death will beat you down, and you will run home to Austin, back to the Governor's Mansion where you belong. Go home, Mrs. Bonner."

  "You need a nurse… and I need to do this."

  "Why? Because you had a fight with the governor and now you need to prove something to him?"

  "Because I need to prove something to myself."

  "And what is that?"

  "That my life can still have meaning. That I can still make a difference." She fought back the tears. "That I'm not too old to be useful."

  He stared at her, as if trying to see into her soul. He finally stood.

  "Okay. Are you hungry?"

  Bode bit into the thick juicy steak. He chewed with the intensity of a man still pissed off at his wife for ruining a sexual encounter with his mistress-and harboring a nagging worry that his wife had been kidnapped. After Ranger Roy's phone call-and despite Mandy's best efforts-he could not recapture the erectile moment. He chased the steak with a swallow of bourbon. Pedro entered the dining room with a portable phone in hand.

  " Senor gobernador — Ranger Roy, he has called again."

  Bode took the phone and answered.

  "Well?"

  "We found your wife, Governor."

  Lindsay Bonner wrapped the green scarf around her head and tucked her red hair underneath. She then put on a wide-brimmed straw hat. She checked herself in the mirror and smiled.

  She was no longer the governor's wife.

  They had stopped off at an outdoor market in Laredo on the way to the doctor's homestead on the other side of town. She shopped for clothes to wear as Nurse Byrne; he shopped for groceries. He said he cooked. Latino music played and Spanish was spoken; it reminded her of their vacation to Acapulco years before. She held a yellow peasant dress against her body and looked in the mirror. She turned at the sound of girls giggling; the doctor stood surrounded by several pretty young Latinas. They flirted and took cell phone photos with the handsome doctor. He really was something of a celebrity on the border. Lindsay now appraised herself in the mirror. She sighed. She was still lean and slim and even considered the glamorous governor's wife; but she was not a beautiful young girl anymore. She was a forty-four-year-old woman.

  Her cell phone rang.

  "What the hell are you doing down on the goddamn border?"

  Bode had stepped out of the dining room. Waiting for the call to ring through, his blood pressure had jacked up to mini-stroke levels. Still, he felt relieved when his wife answered-but his anger and the alcohol quickly took over.

  "Are you drinking?"

  "No… yes."

  He could never lie to her, except about Mandy.

  "How'd you find me?"

  "GPS. Your cell phone."

  "My phone? "

  "Cell phones are just tracking devices that make calls."

  "You tracked my phone?"

  "The Rangers did. So what do you think you're doing?"

  "I'm nursing."

  "Who?"

  "No. I'm going to work as a nurse."

  "In Laredo?"

  "In the colonias."

  "Oh, for Christ's sake, Lindsay, that's crazy!"

  "Maybe to you, Bode. But not to me."

  "You're the governor's wife."

  "Not down here."

  "Go home, Lindsay. Now."

  "No. I'm staying here. Give my best to Mandy."

  The line went dead. He stared at the phone. Shit.

  Lindsay stared at her phone a long moment then looked up at the doctor looking at her. His arms were full with two bags of groceries and his face with the awkward moment.

  "She's twenty-seven. Mandy."

  Which made the moment even more awkward.

  "So," he said with a forced smile, "let us have dinner."

  "I hope you bought wine."

  The governor of Texas downed his bourbon. His third. He needed hard liquor after learning that his wife knew about his mistress.

  "That sonofabitch can carve up a cow faster'n those raptors in that dinosaur movie," John Ed was saying. "I get Manuel to run a dried-up cow inside the game fence every week or so. That big ol' lion sniffs her out in no time, hunts her down, pounces on her, rips her apart. Damnedest thing I've ever seen."

  Mandy, Ranger Hank, and Jim Bob had gone upstairs. Mandy needed her beauty sleep, Hank needed his sports fix on satellite TV, and Jim Bob needed to plug his laptop into a landline like a patient on life support. Bode and John Ed had gone into the study to drink Kentucky bourbon and smoke Cuban cigars.

  "You sure you want me to shoot your lion?"

  "There's more where he came from. Course, you gotta track him down and get close enough to put a bullet in him. Maybe two."

  John Ed puffed on his cigar.

  "Manuel, he'll have the horses saddled and your guns packed, ready to ride at dawn. He's a good tracker. He'll find that lion for you. Used to be the foreman on a game ranch outside Guadalajara, big place catering to Americans. Then the cartels took over the country, so Americans stopped going south to hunt-they became the hunted instead of the hunter. I needed a place to hunt, so I turned this land into a game ranch, hired Manuel. Been with me five years now."

  "He legal?"

  "Hell, no. None of my Mexicans are legal." John Ed chuckled. "While back, me and Manuel, we're riding the range in the Hummer, he asks me, ' Senor John Ed, is Obama going to make me a citizen?' I said, 'Why the hell do you want to be an American citizen?' He says, 'I want to vote.' You believe that? I bring him up here, give him a job, place to live… now he wants to vote. How's that for gratitude?"

  John Ed Johnson had come of age back when men were men and women were cheerleaders and Mexicans did the hard work and kept their mouths shut.

  "Life was simple back then," John Ed said. "Oil, cattle, and Mexicans doing what they were told and didn't expect us to educate their kids or make them citizens."

  Bode knew better than to get John Ed started on Mexicans, so he diverted the conversation.

  "You riding out with us in the morning?"

  "Nope. Man my age, I sleep in. You and Jim Bob have fun. Me and Mandy, we'll have a long breakfast." He winked. "You know, I never lost my testosterone. Most men my age, they need a pill to get it up, if they can. Not me. You?"

  " Me? Hell, no."

  Bode said it with such conviction he almost believed himself.

  "I still wake up every day with a hard-on," John Ed said, "which is why I sleep in… usually with Rosita. I enjoy sex in the morning."

  John Ed Johnson had a reputation for being a horny old bastard, chasing skirts all across Texas and plowing through four wives. He was currently between wives if not skirts. But being a self-made billionaire-and not in computer code that no one understood, but in cattle and oil that everyone understood-he had achieved that larger-than-life legendary Texan status, the kind of man kids would read about in their Texas history class one day, like LBJ and H.L. Hunt.
A Texas politician could never have a better friend-if you always said yes-or a worse enemy-if you ever said no. You did not want to be on his bad side. As Jim Bob said, "That's a dark place indeed." John Ed had contributed $20 million to each of Bode's last two campaigns-there was no limit on campaign contributions by individuals in Texas-and Bode was waiting on his $20 million check for the current campaign. John Ed Johnson had put Bode Bonner in the Governor's Mansion.

  And he could take Bode Bonner out.

  Like Bode, John Ed had grown up on a cattle ranch; unlike the Bonner family's modest five-thousand-acre spread, the Johnson family's land in West Texas spread over three counties and was measured in square miles rather than acres. His granddaddy had taken a hundred thousand head of cattle on the long trail drives north to the railheads in Kansas back in the 1800s. By John Ed's time, the trains had come to Texas.

  But if his old man had been the Bick Benedict of his time, John Ed was the Jett Rink of his. After his dad died, he turned production on the ranch from Angus beef to black gold. Oil. Just as Texas had produced the beef the nation needed during his old man's time, Texas produced the oil the world needed during John Ed's time. Texas had so much oil that from 1930, when the great East Texas field was discovered, and for the next forty years, the Texas Railroad Commission controlled the price of oil-in the entire world-by controlling the amount of oil Texas produced. Texas sat on a sea of oil.

  But the Middle East sat on an ocean of oil.

  In 1960, the Arabs formed OPEC, modeled after the Railroad Commission. By 1973, Texas no longer controlled the price of oil; OPEC did. Americans stood in gas lines during the oil embargo because Texas no longer supplied the world's oil or even America's oil; the Arabs did. For the last forty years, the Arabs had controlled the price of oil in the world. Even in Texas.

  "Took a lot of the fun out of the oil business," John Ed always said, "not being able to control prices."

  So John Ed moved on to the next big thing: water. Just as a landowner in Texas owns the oil under his land, he also owns the water. And he can sell that water.

  "Ninety percent of Texans live in the city now, and they're fast running out of water because they want their pools full and their grass green. They'll be drinking spit in twenty years, ten if this drought don't let up. Then they'll pay an arm and a leg for drinking water. My water. I bought up groundwater rights all across West Texas, figure I can pump that water out of the ground, pipe it to the cities, and turn a nice profit. Water's more valuable than oil these days. If you control water, you control Texas."

  "I thought you already controlled Texas."

  "Not all of it."

  "What'll happen to West Texas without water?"

  "Who cares? Ain't much to look at now."

  "How you figure on piping the water to the cities?"

  "I've got to build the pipelines, hundreds of miles. Problem is, I've got to acquire the rights-of-way from landowners. I can negotiate with a thousand owners and buy the rights-of-way, but that gets expensive and time-consuming. Or I can condemn that land… well, I could if I possessed eminent domain power as a common carrier, like my gas company."

  His expression told Bode that he was about to ask the governor of Texas for a small favor.

  "I need a special bill, Bode, that grants my water company common carrier status. I need the power to condemn land for my pipelines. I need you to twist a few arms-the speaker's and the lieutenant governor's-and get my bill passed."

  "There'll be some political heat, if this gets out."

  "Maybe. But the Professor said your latest poll numbers are high enough to weather some heat."

  "You already talked to Jim Bob about this?"

  "Yep. When he called about you boys coming out. He's your political advisor, isn't he?"

  Bode nodded.

  "So-can I count on you, Bode?"

  Bode didn't like it-giving John Ed Johnson the power to take people's land for his water pipeline-but he needed John Ed's $20 million.

  "You bet, John Ed."

  "Appreciate that, Bode. I won't forget. Oh, tell Jim Bob I'll wire my twenty-five million campaign contribution over Monday."

  "Twenty-five?"

  John Ed shrugged. "After seeing your gal Mandy, I figured you could use a little extra spending money."

  "Thanks." Bode drank his bourbon. "You know, John Ed, I appreciate the support you've given me as governor. If I made a run for the White House, would you back me?"

  "Why the hell would you want to do that?"

  "An adventure."

  "Cheaper adventures to be had… Like your gal Mandy."

  John Ed drew a breath on his cigar then exhaled sweet smoke.

  "Buying the Governor's Mansion, that's a forty-million-dollar deal. Buying the White House, that's a billion-dollar deal. And turning a profit on that kind of investment is damn hard 'cause you got to buy Congress, too, and those bastards don't come cheap. Wall Street pays billions for Congress, every election cycle. Even I can't fund that for long-five billion don't go as far as it used to. You want to move up to the White House, you gonna have to get the big boys behind you. They write those kind of checks every four years without blinking an eye."

  John Ed drank his bourbon.

  "Hell, son, was me, I'd stick to being governor-for-life."

  "I just think I could win, riding the wave."

  "Wave? What wave?"

  "The tea party."

  John Ed snorted. "Pissin' in the wind. The money always wins in politics."

  "I don't know, John Ed. The middle class is pretty fired up about the social issues-abortion, gay marriage, immigration."

  "That's why they're stuck in the middle class."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, politics ain't about none of that social crap. It's about money. Rich people and poor people, we vote for the money. Poor folks vote for anyone promising to give them more money, rich folks for anyone promising to take less of our money. But the middle class, they take their Bibles into the voting booth-and that costs them money."

  "How so?"

  "Because while they're fretting over girls getting abortions and boys screwing boys, the politicians are stealing them blind. See, rich folks like me, we've got a lot of money individually, but not as a group. Hell, Obama could take every penny from every billionaire in America, and it wouldn't fund the government but for a few months, not when the Feds spend ten billion dollars every day. The big money's in the middle class. A hundred million folks working their butts off every day to put Junior and Sissy through college, that's where the income's at, that's the mother lode of taxes. Only way the government can spend four trillion a year is to tap the middle class. So the politicians keep the middle class occupied with that social crap-"

  "While they steal their money."

  "Exactly."

  "Never occurred to me."

  " 'Cause you're middle class. No offense."

  Bode swallowed his bourbon. John Ed Johnson didn't pull his punches, and he wasn't a billionaire for nothing. Bode wouldn't turn his back on the old man, but he learned something every time they talked. It wasn't exactly a father-son relationship, but it was a relationship of sorts nonetheless.

  "How 'bout another bourbon, Governor?"

  The governor's wife sipped her wine. She and the doctor were sitting on the back porch of his house in rocking chairs. Pancho, the golden retriever, lay on the plank wood floor. Soft music drifted out through open windows. Mexico beyond the river seemed serene and peaceful at night. She had settled in to the guesthouse and cut her hair then showered and dressed in her new clothes for dinner. The doctor did cook. They ate grilled fish and drank wine. She had awakened that morning in the Governor's Mansion in Austin; she was now staring at the stars over the Rio Grande.

  "This is my retreat from the reality of the colonias," the doctor said. He pointed up. "Look, see the eagle."

  The bird glided on the currents back and forth between Mexico and America.

 
; "Does the reality ever make you question your choice to work in the colonias? "

  "Sometimes. But it is a useless question to ask. This is where I belong. My life will play out on this river."

  They were silent for a time, just the sounds of the river and the night. Then the doctor spoke.

  "Back before the Mexican War-what the Mexicans call the American Invasion-steamboats ran up and down the Rio Grande."

  "It doesn't seem deep enough."

  "It is not now. The river often runs dry before it reaches the Gulf of Mexico. But before the dams and the droughts, the river was deep and swift and wide. Ferries and steamboats ran the river. I often sit here and imagine what life on this river was like back then, when all of this land was Mexico, before the history of the border turned bloody. And wrongs beget wrongs."

  He stared toward the river a long moment before he spoke again.

  "History runs deep here on the border. Much deeper than the river."

  That night in South Texas, the governor's wife went to bed happy. In West Texas, the governor went to bed with his mistress. Neither knew that their lives were about to change forever.

  TWELVE

  From two hundred fifty yards out, Bode Bonner sighted in a feral hog. A big one, at least three hundred pounds, feeding at dawn. One of three million roaming wild in the State of Texas. Nasty creatures, a nuisance to ranchers and farmers, rutting up pastures and crops. Consequently, the state authorized year-round hunting for feral hogs, even from helicopters. Feral entrepreneurs trapped and sold them to the Japanese, who considered wild boar meat a delicacy. Texans considered it coyote bait. Bode exhaled and squeezed the trigger. The hog dropped like a sack of potatoes when the. 375-caliber bullet impacted its head.

  "Good shot," Jim Bob said.

  The Professor was smoking one of John Ed's Cuban cigars and spotting for Bode through high-powered binoculars. Ranger Hank stood behind them, as if on the lookout for a Comanche war party. Manuel held the horses.

  "Easy shot, with the wind down and this rifle. Even with a hangover."