Hope Rides Again

by Andrew Shaffer

  Getting your hands dirty—really dirty—has a way of rubbing off on you. It’s tough to get them clean again afterward, no matter how hard you scrub. Lady Macbeth knew it. You can wash the blood off, but it’s never really gone.

  18

  I stood in the wings with Barack while he was introduced. I’d pulled up in front of the Tribune Tower with enough time for the president to get a shave and a haircut, but of course he took the free moments to meet with some young fans backstage.

  The speaker introducing him went by the name of Erick Rothschild. Barack Obama didn’t need an introduction, especially in front of a hometown crowd. Still, it was customary to have a warm-up act. Even Roy Orbison had one when I saw him at the Delaware State Fair in 1977. Tom Petty. A pretty good opening act, as far as opening acts go.

  Rothschild was the billionaire CEO of Monteverde, an alternative energy company he started in his bedroom in the great state of Montana. At a time when the United States was backing out of international climate accords, it was a pleasant surprise to find enterprising young folk like Rothschild taking the initiative to pave the way for a better, cleaner future.

  He was no Tom Petty, though.

  “—and now let me welcome to the stage, President Barack Obama!”

  I clapped Barack on the back and told him to break a leg. Which is a strange thing to wish upon somebody, especially a dear friend. It was one of those sayings you don’t really think about, like, “Go fly a kite.” I might as well have told Barack to go fly a kite, for all the good it would have done. You couldn’t hear a thing, the applause was so deafening.

  The crowd’s fervor carried Barack to the podium, but quickly died down. Some had seen his brief remarks that morning, before Caruso’s keynote. The audience now was three times the size, though. Standing room only. There was a nervous energy in the air. Barack’s return to his hometown—and to public life—had been slow. We’d both spent the first year out of office sitting on the sidelines, watching the news while sitting on our hands. It was like selling your house and seeing the buyer chop down every tree you’d planted.

  “Chicago,” Barack said. “How you doin’?”

  The thunderous applause returned, and Barack broke into a wide smile. “It’s been a minute.” The line garnered a few chuckles. Like my grandmother used to say: it was funny because it was true. The crowd relaxed.

  Barack started with what sounded like a rehearsed ode to his adopted hometown. After his first couple of years as an undergrad in California, he’d picked up and moved to New York. He’d needed to get away from that carefree attitude out west—to get as far away from Hawaii as possible. He wanted to distance himself from his friends, his classmates, his family. Be a serious student. Take up law. He’d somehow convinced himself that he had to live like a monk in a studio in Harlem. To bear down and study. His mother and sister visited him during this time. “Why don’t you smile anymore?” his sister Maya had asked.

  In Chicago, he’d found his smile again.

  In Chicago, he’d found himself again.

  Sweet home Chicago.

  Barack repeated a lot of the same points he’d hit during his rally appearances last fall. These days, he spoke less of hope and more of change. It was a call to action. Neither of us had a pool of speechwriters to help us prepare our remarks—that era was long gone. Our old speechwriters were all podcasting now. One of these days, I was going to have to ask someone what in blue blazes a “podcast” was.

  Barack had told me to wait around for him after his speech, but I had no such intentions. I didn’t want to get him into trouble with Rahm or anyone else in Chicago. This was his town, not mine, but sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. The Red Door was a giant sequoia. I wasn’t accusing Barack of covering for his friend—at least not consciously. But we all overlook our friends’ flaws. That’s how friendship works. Even when they look guilty to the world, we can turn a blind eye. I’d seen it a thousand times. I’d been guilty of it, too. If I was going to open Barack’s eyes to the possibility the pastor wasn’t all he was cracked up to be, I had to dig up some dirt.

  19

  If I took the Firebird, there was a good chance I could poke my nose around Pastor Brown’s church and be back before Barack knew I’d even gone anywhere. The way he was feeding off the crowd, he’d be speaking for at least another hour. Maybe two.

  Borrowing Steve’s car wasn’t going to be easy, since I’d given him back the keys. The second and more significant barrier was that the Firebird was being loaded onto a flatbed by a particularly unresponsive and unsympathetic tow-truck driver.

  “Don’t you know who I am?” I said. My voice was already hoarse from screaming at him.

  “Yeah,” the driver said. “You’re a guy that’s going to need four hundred bucks to get your car back from the towing yard.”

  It was my fault. Sort of. When I’d dropped Barack and Steve off at the Tribune Tower, I was supposed to sit in the car, idling, until a Secret Service agent could be dispatched to park it for us. I’d seen no point to that, since there was a perfectly good parking spot less than half a block away on Michigan Avenue. I wasn’t about to give up such a primo location, so I’d given the Firebird some gas and whipped around the corner and into the spot before anyone could steal it from me. I’d jumped out and checked the meter and saw a red flyer attached to it. Parking was restricted until 4 p.m. due to the parade. However, people had been streaming back to their cars. I’d assumed the city wouldn’t enforce the parking restrictions, since the parade was over.

  Apparently, I’d been wrong.

  I had thirty-seven bucks in my wallet, not counting a couple of coins in my pockets. Not enough to bribe the tow-truck driver with. Maybe in 1967. Not that the guy cared, but my sleek, brown leather wallet was worth more than the cash in it. It had been a gift from Barack our final week in office. It was stamped with the White House seal, with my initials in the corner. Coincidentally, I’d also gifted him a wallet—black suede, but also with the White House seal and his initials. I stared at the wallet in my hands and remembered that day, down to Barack’s very words:

  “This is like a good O. Henry story,” he had said as he marveled at our matching gifts.

  “O’Henry? An Irish writer?”

  “American.” Barack flipped open his wallet. “Oliver Henry. It was a pen name, so he might have been…Wait a second.”

  “Something the matter?”

  He pointed at a photo of his kids that I’d inserted into the wallet. “Where’d you get the photos in here?”

  “Oh, that’s all Jill. She must have printed them off the Internet.”

  “Check yours.”

  I glanced inside and saw reproductions from Biden family photo albums.

  “All Michelle’s doing,” Barack said.

  I’m still not sure who started snickering first, but pretty soon we were both doubled over, hands on each other’s shoulders, laughing up a storm. Each of us had farmed out the task of getting the other a going-away present. Jill and Michelle had conspired to coordinate the gifts. Only one photo in both wallets matched: a snapshot of Barack and me together at a basketball game, dressed down and leaning in to one another, sharing a chuckle.

  “Need a lift?” a familiar voice said, breaking through my memories.

  I snapped out of my daydream to see a black Suburban pulled up to the curb. The tow-truck driver was busy locking Steve’s car down on the tow bed, not paying any attention to me. (I’d been flipping through my wallet—perhaps he’d sensed I didn’t have the cash to bribe him. Perhaps he was an honest man in a city of thieves.) The SUV’s rear passenger window was rolled down.

  “Well?” Michelle Obama asked.

  “I came out here to plug the meter,” I said, returning my wallet to my jacket.

  “That’s your car?”

  “A friend’s.”

  “Your friend isn’t going to be very happy,” Michelle said. Either she didn’t know the car was Steve�
��s, or she was playing along.

  She whispered something to the Secret Service agent in the driver’s seat. Then she popped her head back out the window. “Don’t worry about the car. I’ll have someone take care of it. Why don’t you hop on in? I’ll give you a ride.”

  I had two options: I could keep up the lie that I’d only been plugging the meter, adding some bull honky about needing to get back to the conference for the end of Barack’s speech. Or I could come clean and accept Michelle’s invitation for a ride.

  They say honesty is the best policy. In my experience, I had to agree.

  Sometimes, however, you have to make an exception.

  “See, the thing is, I have to get back…” I threw a look over my shoulder at the Tribune Tower right as Steve burst out the front door, sending the Van Heusen–clad security goon tumbling to the sidewalk. While they were tangled up on the ground, I scooched into the backseat.

  “Where you headed?” Michelle asked. “The airport?”

  Whether she knew it or not, she was giving me one last chance to change my mind. To put myself on standby and get back to Wilmington at a decent hour. No one would be able to fault me for leaving town early. Barack would understand. I’d been assaulted by a bookseller and chased around town by a leprechaun. When Shaun woke, he would understand. I didn’t owe him anything—he would forgive me. I wasn’t a real detective shelving his case. I was Joe Biden, former vice president.

  If I gave up on finding him justice now, there was one person who wouldn’t forgive me: Joe Biden.

  “I’m headed to the Red Door,” I said.

  20

  Even by Secret Service standards, Steve was in ridiculous physical shape. Jill had once shown me his Instagram account, which was filled with dozens of pictures of his “progress,” a.k.a. shirtless selfies. I didn’t know why anyone would want to see something like that.

  Jill told me she didn’t know, either.

  No matter how finely honed a machine he had transformed his body into, Steve was no match for the horsepower under the hood of Michelle’s Suburban. Through the tinted rear window, I watched as he became smaller and smaller.

  Satisfied that we’d outrun him, I turned to Michelle. She’d been on her phone and hadn’t seen Steve trying to chase us down. “Sorry, you were saying?”

  “I asked if you were going to see the pastor,” she said. “What time are you supposed to meet him?”

  “I’m not meeting him. Just dropping by, since I missed him at breakfast.”

  “Do you want me to call him first? He might not be in.”

  “I was hoping to surprise him. If he’s not there, I’ll take some photos with his staff.” I looked out over the dyed-green river. It was the color of the slime my grandkids played with. “You don’t see that every day, do you?”

  “Want to go for a swim, Joe?”

  “Left my trunks at home.”

  “It’s not as bad as it looks. The dye is nontoxic. The Chicago River isn’t as polluted as it used to be. Every sewage pipe in the city once flowed right into it. This was a problem because the river drained into Lake Michigan, which is where the city’s drinking water is pumped from. It took them a while to realize why people were getting sick and dying.”

  “So they stopped flushing their toilets into the river.”

  She shook her head. “They reversed the flow of the river.”

  “And where does it drain these days?”

  “That’s a good question,” she said. “But I don’t want to know the answer.”

  Neither did I. “Meant to ask, how was brunch?”

  “It was all right. The eggs benedict—”

  “Did she mention me?”

  “You want to know if Oprah mentioned you.”

  I nodded enthusiastically, as if I’d been gifted a brand-new Pontiac G6.

  “You’re acting very strange, Joe. Even for you.”

  It took us driving past the address three times to realize that the Red Door wasn’t a church church—at least not the kind I was used to. The Red Door’s house of worship was a vast warehouse, all big and boxy like an old Best Buy. No steeples or stained-glass windows. No crosses. No sign with worship times.

  There was a red door.

  “That’s got to be it,” I said.

  Michelle looked unsure, but GPS confirmed we were in the right place. “This used to be a bad area,” she said.

  “There are no bad areas—only bad people.”

  “Are you trying to mansplain the South Side of Chicago to me, Joe?”

  I shut my yap.

  They dropped me off at the curb right out front. There was a parking meter with a faded “out of order” label taped over the coin slot. Michelle wasn’t staying. She had “other business to attend to”—and if it had to do with Oprah, she didn’t say so. It was fine by me. The main reason I wanted her to go on her way was that Steve was bound to put out an APB with his Secret Service team: Find Joe Biden. I wanted them to be far away when the call came in. I didn’t want to have to explain what I was up to before I could even get up to it.

  Despite the fact that this had clearly been an industrial area at one point, the sidewalks were lined with tall, sturdy oaks. There were a few apartment buildings—new or remodeled, I couldn’t tell—across from the church. A construction crew was working down the street on a lot, digging away at a pit. Gentrification in real time.

  My phone rang. Jill.

  “Hey, Honey Bunny,” I said.

  “Is now a good time?”

  “Just cruising around with the former First Lady,” I said, watching Michelle’s Suburban turn the corner and disappear.

  “Don’t let me keep you, then. I was calling to let you know we might have some guests over for dinner tomorrow. The whole family. Everbody wants to see you.”

  “It’s not a surprise party, is it?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Was this your idea?”

  She laughed. “What do you think?”

  My wife knew how much surprises made my skin crawl, and she loved watching me squirm. One time, aboard Air Force Two, she’d crawled into an overhead bin and screamed when I opened it. I had screamed, too.

  She told me to have a safe flight home. “Save your appetite for tomorrow, though—I’m making your favorite.”

  “Ice cream?”

  “Lasagna.”

  “That’s Garfield’s favorite.”

  “Tell me you haven’t been feeding him pasta, Joe.”

  “Is that bad?” The orange tabby we’d adopted shared a name with the cartoon cat. It wouldn’t have been my first choice for a pet name, but it was what his previous owner—an Amtrak engineer who’d passed away—had called him. “But for the record, you’re saying I shouldn’t feed him pasta? Is he on some sort of low-carb diet?”

  Jill sighed. “We’ll talk about it when you get home.”

  I told her I loved her. I tried to hide the exhaustion in my voice, but she knew I was running on fumes. Too many months on the road. What she didn’t know was that I couldn’t lay down and rest. This afternoon, I would be skipping my nap. A kid was in the hospital; that was enough to keep me going. A kid who’d all but said he wished he’d had a dad like me. Maybe this was my fight, maybe it wasn’t, but I couldn’t just stand by and do nothing, could I?

  For the past year, my anger had been rising. The nationalistic rhetoric in our politics was out of control. Hate crimes were on the rise. I’d hit the StairMaster in every hotel gym from Poughkeepsie to Portland and hadn’t shed a single pound of rage. For once, though, you could see some muscle definition on my upper body. Nothing like Steve, but enough that it was noticeable. Last time I’d seen Jill, she thought I looked too lean. Too gaunt. I told her I was getting down to my fighting weight.

  21

  The eponymous red door was locked. I pressed the doorbell enough times to annoy somebody into answering it. No one did. What if I was selling Girl Scout cookies? Their loss, I guess.

  I p
eered through the tinted glass. I could see the lobby, carpeted and brightly lit. A couple of potted plants. A few framed paintings. A cross here and there. Wooden doors that must have led to the main chapel.

  No reception desk or secretary. This wasn’t the type of church that was open to strangers, the type that might offer refuge to lost souls seeking shelter from a storm. Then again, I wasn’t lost and it wasn’t storming. Time to check for another way in. It wouldn’t bother me if Pastor Brown wasn’t in. It would be better, in fact. I wanted to see the church with my own eyes, and not the church he wanted me to see. The truth I could see with my own eyes was the only truth I trusted these days.

  “Truth” had somehow become subjective. Who had seen that coming? The country was crumbling in slow motion, dismantled and sold off under our noses. For people like Shaun’s aunt, though—and for the residents of Chicago’s poorer neighborhoods—things had been in disarray for a long time.

  Half a block down the street, a moving truck pulled to a stop at a gated parking lot. The church’s name was crudely stenciled on the side with spray paint. The gate drew to the side and the truck entered.

  By the time I reached the gate, it had closed again. Rusted barbed wire atop the chain-link fence stretched around the lot.

  The truck backed up to an open door. The loading dock. A good thirty yards from the gate. I could just make out a pair of guys unloading boxes from the truck. If the Red Door was involved in Shaun Denton’s shooting, all sorts of criminal activity could conceivably be on the table. I’d come face-to-face with the opioid crisis last summer in Wilmington. What would I run into in Chicago? I had to get closer to see what was being unloaded.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to happen at the present moment. Not unless I had the huevos to scale the fence and sprint toward the loading dock, all in full view of the workers and the camera on high. Something told me that anyone dumb enough to try that would wind up leaving their huevos dangling from the barbed wire like a pair of fuzzy dice from a rearview mirror.