The Candidate (14 page)

* * *

HODGES SLAMMED down his fist on the table of his office in the campaign’s Manchester headquarters. His voice rang out and carried down the corridors, temporarily causing anyone in earshot to stop working. It was like a primal howl.

“I didn’t want this!” he yelled. “Jesus Christ! I’m campaigning against this sort of bullshit.”

In front of him was a pile of newspapers, all blaring the same story about Stanton and the flag-burning picture. It was a political firestorm that spread from Lauren’s blog to the Drudge Report to cable news TV in just a matter of hours. It showed no sign of dying down.

But there was no denying Hodges’ genuine fury as he stared at Dee, Mike and a half dozen other top staffers. He suddenly looked ten years older, his skin drawn tightly over his lean face as a vein throbbed at his temple. He put one hand to the side of his head and stared directly at Dee.

“Goddamn it, Dee!” he said. “I know Governor Stanton. She’s a good woman. She loves her country and now people will think we’ve smeared her with this… this…” He waved a hand over the papers in front of him, all of them featuring a beaming 18-year-old Stanton standing near a burning American flag.

“This… bullshit!” Hodges said at last.

Dee withstood his withering gaze and let the storm die down, waiting for the dark clouds to stop fizzing with lightning and fury. Finally, she spoke. Her voice was firm and quiet.

“No one likes this,” she said. “But look at these poll numbers.” She pushed a sheaf of papers to Hodges.

He picked them up and scanned through them like the General he once was, picking out the positions of the opposing forces. He put them down again.

“Are these for real?” he asked quietly.

Dee nodded. “We’re within three points of Stanton,” she said. “If we play this right and make the last few days of this campaign about national security, I think it will give us four extra points. Maybe even six if we get lucky. It can push us over the top. We can win New Hampshire.”

Hodges thought for a moment, glanced again at the poll numbers, and then placed them over the offending newspaper headlines. “Go on,” he said.

Dee stood up. She saw she had her opening. “Let’s drive this point home. Let’s make it all about national security. You personally don’t have to go anywhere near this flag-burning issue. You don’t even have to mention Stanton by name. The press will do that for you. Just talk about your own record. Iraq, Afghanistan. Your service. You know what it’s like to serve your country. That’s all you have to talk about.”

She left the rest unsaid but there was not a single person in the room who did not mentally add the words: “…and we’ll take care of the rest.”

Hodges stood up.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m not going to touch any of this dirty stuff. This campaign is about me and my record. That’s what I’m fighting on. Not bringing down this sort of shit on my opponent.”

Dee nodded and Hodges headed for the door.

“Oh, just one more thing, Senator. Is there any other part of your service record we should be putting out there? Afghanistan and Iraq is solid territory and we tell that story well. But sometimes it’s good to have something new. Perhaps from earlier in your career. Like in Central America? You were in Guatemala for a couple years. Should we be pushing that out there?”

Mike bristled inside, stunned at Dee’s gambit. He scanned Hodges for any sort of reaction, any hint of something amiss or a distant pluck of conscience or fear. But there was nothing. Hodges mulled over the thought.

“Not much to tell, Dee. Let’s keep it simple. Stick to more recent stuff and avoid ancient history.”

“Simple is good, sir,” said Dee.

As the group filed out of the door, Dee plucked Mike by the elbow and guided him into a backroom.

“That was a risky move,” Mike said.

Dee shook her head. “I had to test the waters. See if I could get a rise out of him.”

“And?” said Mike.

Dee did not bother answering. They both watched Hodges’ face intently as hawks looking for prey. But there had been nothing. No reaction at all.

“The stakes are as high as they can be now, Mike,” Dee said. “Things are going to get dirtier, so we need to know everything we can about our man.”

She handed him a plain white envelope. “A ticket to Guatemala City,” she said. “You leave tomorrow.”

* * *

HIS MOTHER sobbed as Mike answered the phone in his hotel room. At first he could not understand who called him amid the soft moans and cries. But gradually he realized what was going on.

“Mom?” he said. “Calm down. Speak slowly.”

There was a silence and then he heard the old, familiar phrase; the one he already suspected would be behind his mother’s woe.

“It’s Jaynie,” she whispered.

Mike shut his eyes and held the receiver to his forehead. He held it so hard it felt like the cold plastic might bore through his skull.

“What is it?” he asked eventually.

“She’s had an overdose, Michael. The poor, poor girl. She’s in the hospital. The doctors say she’ll be all right. But she’s in a terrible state. You have to come and see her. It’s not far.”

Mike felt a shiver of emotion travel over his skin like the reverberations of a beating drum. His mind swam with a succession of terrible images: of Jaynie in a hospital bed, of her collapsed in the street or found in some dilapidated squat or vacant home. His chest tightened and a cold sweat broke out on his forehead. Then it was followed by something worse. He looked at the plane ticket that Dee had given him. It sat, accusingly, mockingly, on his bedside table.

“I can’t,” he said.

There was a stunned silence at the end of the phone.

“Michael, Jaynie is in the hospital,” his mother said, her voice level and calm but accusing.

“I just can’t, Mom. There are things going on here that I can’t talk about. But I can’t just up and walk away from them. Not even for this.”

Again there was a moment of silence at the other end of the receiver. He could hear his mother breathe softly, her upset now replaced by an icy disappointment.

“Okay, Michael. I hope what you are doing is worth it.”

After he put down the phone Mike sat on the side of the bed and held his ticket in his hand, while her words echoed in his mind in an endlessly replaying loop of guilt and speculation. He had no answer to her question and, as he searched his mind to justify his actions, he found no solace.

CHAPTER 10

THE PLANE SWOOPED into Guatemala City as its engines strained to cope with a shuddering series of spirals. Mike looked down from a window seat over a city that spread like a blanket among a series of high volcanic peaks and knife like gorges. For almost as far as he could see, he saw slums of ragged shacks and grimy concrete squares stretched out in a bewildering mess. It spoke of an unimaginable sprawl of humanity, collected together and dumped here, so far from the neat orderly suburbs of New Hampshire that he left behind. It was surreal for him to be here as the plane’s wheels touched tarmac with a gentle thud. How could these two places possibly be linked? It seemed like some sort of fever dream. Yet here he was.

Mike passed swiftly through passport control and picked up his rental car, a tiny little red Fiat, that felt like driving in a rickety tin can compared to American cars. He guided it into the chaos of Guatemala City’s streets, thick with choking traffic, like a river of metal, flowing in and out of the capital. As he pulled out into a phalanx of city buses painted a vibrant red, he gripped the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles turned white. The young woman at the rental counter had warned him about the buses with a laughing smile when he told her it was his first time in Guatemala.

“We call them killer tomatoes,” she said.

He thought he misheard but now he understood perfectly. The giant red, rickety vehicles clattered randomly around the streets, swerving in and out of the traffic, oblivious to their fellow road-users. Aside from their color, they did not look like tomatoes, but killers they most certainly were. Mike thought about heading out into the countryside right away in an effort to eat some miles up on the long drive to Livingston before the sun set. But the traffic was such a shock that he decided against it. In a confusing series of U-turns and hair-raising loops, Mike finally spotted the gleaming skyscrapers of downtown and he emerged into a different world – one that he recognized. It was of tidy sidewalks, gleaming glass buildings and rows of neat shops. He spotted the imposing structure of a Hilton hotel and drove up to the lobby, gratefully passing the keys to a waiting bellhop. The man looked in puzzlement at the cheap, tiny car amid the hulking shiny SUVs that littered the rest of the forecourt, but gratefully accepted a handful of dollars as a tip.

“
Gracias, señor
,” he said and guided Mike inside the hotel.

Immediately Mike was struck by a familiar sound. It was so jarring that he stood still, his mind struggling to comprehend what was going on.

“Let me tell you how we’re going to save this country…”

It was Hodges’ voice ringing out through the hotel lobby. Mike looked around and half-expected to see Hodges standing behind him. But the voice came from the TV inside the lobby bar. A group of people gathered around it. Mike sat down and nodded at the bartender for a beer. The TV played a CNN live package straight from New Hampshire. About half a dozen people in the bar watched a feed from the start of one of Hodges’ rallies. Mike was stunned. These Guatemalans were just as entranced as the people back in America. Then, after about fifteen minutes of the speech, the coverage cut away to a news anchor who announced the details of the latest polls. It had Stanton at 35 points, with Hodges at 32. No one else in the chasing pack was even close. One or two of the Guatemalans muttered in disappointment at the numbers. But Mike knew better and smiled. They were closing in on Stanton. Just as Dee predicted, national security now dominated the last days of the campaign and was Hodges’ strong point. He did not have to attack Stanton over the flag-burning picture. The media was doing that for him. He remembered handing Lauren the memory stick that Dee gave him, recalling the guilt he felt. But he was more sure of himself now. Dee was right, as usual. She saw it coming. If they could win New Hampshire, it would all be worth it.

“Are you American?” one of the young drinkers asked Mike.

He turned from the TV and noticed a pretty girl with long dark hair. She looked like a student. He nodded.

“What do you think of Senator Hodges?” she asked. “He is a good man, no?”

Mike began to speak, then stopped himself. He was on a mission. He needed to be careful.

“He seems so,” he said. “But I try not to pay too much attention to politics.”

* * *

THE NEXT day Mike drove out of the city before the sun rose, hoping to beat the traffic. The road headed out of the central highlands where the capital stood, and down into a long central valley that wound its way to the sea. Even though Guatemala was a small country something about the journey felt epic. The countryside was breathtaking in its beauty, especially after the frigid landscapes of Iowa and New Hampshire. It was verdant and fresh, dotted with tiny fields and farms beneath a blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds. Green-shouldered volcanoes dominated the horizon and towered above the highway as it snaked over their flanks. Mike wound down the window, letting the warm air inside, and suddenly felt a surge of liberating freedom. Out of the campaign bubble, he found it easy to let his mind wander.

He already knew a sketchy history of the country from his work with Guatemalan immigrants in Florida’s fruit plantations. It was a nation split between an indigenous population of mostly Mayan Indians, many of them still speaking Spanish as a second language, and the mixed blood descendents of Spanish conquerors who took local wives. The higher up the social ladder you went, the more white the population, until you got to a tiny elite of mostly pure blood whites. Conversely, the lower down you went the more Indian people became, until you hit vast tracts of impoverished farmers lorded over by absentee landowners and still tilling their ancestral soil as landless tenants. The divide often spilled into violence and in 1960 slowly burned into a civil war that lasted 36 years and became the longest and bloodiest in all of Latin America that cost tens of thousands of lives.

Although Mike knew the tragic history of the country, he could not square it with the landscape rolling out in front of him. It seemed so warm and peaceful. He stopped in a busy market town called Salama just before the highway dipped down out of the mountains and he bought an armful of meat-filled fried pastries for lunch. He leaned against the car as he ate and watched groups of Indian women, dressed in kaleidoscope-like dresses, sit at their stalls selling corn, vegetables, clothes and trinkets. A few noticed him and giggled and laughed among themselves. He caught a few snatches of what they said but they did not speak Spanish. Their tongue sounded alien to him, just like it had when he heard Benitez talk in Kansas. Yet it was also beautiful, full of incomprehensible vowels and consonants. This was the language’s homeland, among these copper-skinned people and their soaring hills and deep valleys. He strained to hear more and smiled, trying to catch their eye and engage them in conversation, but they just looked away.