The Candidate (22 page)

Mike strained to say no. He knew he should. He did not have the strength to deal with Jaynie right now. But he felt his resistance melt at the softness of her touch, at the pleading at the edge of her voice. He said nothing and just made room for her in the booth, scrunching up to create space for Jaynie at the table. It was always like that.

* * *

THREE HOURS later Mike stumbled along in a dizzy, drunken haze, immune to the midnight cold that caressed his skin. Jaynie walked by his side and giggled as they slipped and slithered down an earthen bank towards the railway tracks that were a shortcut back to Jaynie’s trailer.

The evening was, in the end, just like old times. Jaynie was funny and flirtatious and the three of them sank into an orgy of reminiscence. They relived their school days, their college vacations and all the tales they relegated to a half-remembered past, like it was a foreign country. They shot pool and slammed whiskies, put their favorite songs on the juke box until well past midnight when Sean finally declared that he needed to leave and get back to his family. Jaynie raised a single eyebrow at Mike and wordlessly the two left the bar. Mike shed his jacket and placed it around her shoulders to ward off the freezing air. Now they bumped along the train tracks, like off-kilter dance partners, laughing loud at each stumble and pratfall.

“You remember the prom?” Jaynie giggled. “Didn’t we come down here that night?”

“Yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever been as drunk as that,” he said and laughed. “Nor as happy.” He remembered that far-off evening when they were both 17, already dating for two years, and the sweethearts of their class. They got drunk on a bottle of moonshine from one of Jaynie’s country uncles and flung themselves around the dance floor like whirling dervishes. Then they came down to the railway tracks to watch the stars madly circle overhead and make love in the heat of a summer night.

“Feels like a long time ago now,” Jaynie said. Suddenly she seemed more sober than he was. She steadied him and helped him off the tracks as they neared the spot where they could scramble up into Jaynie’s back yard.

“You know. I owe you so many apologies, Mike,” she said. “I know I’ve got into more trouble than anyone ever thought possible. I know I was impossible to be around, let alone stay married to. I don’t blame you for leaving.”

There was not a trace of bitterness or rancor in her voice, just a whiff of regret and melancholy.

“We were just kids, Jaynie,” Mike said as they clambered up the slope towards a copse of trees behind which the dark hulk of Jaynie’s trailer could be seen.

She slipped her arm through his and helped him along. She felt warm beside him and he thought of the touch of her flesh alongside his. It had been a long time, he thought. He looked at her and traced the line of her face, still beautiful in this half-light. She was still in there; his Jaynie. Through all the time and the drugs and the booze and the hopelessness, somewhere in the core of her being, a little diamond shined on.

They arrived at the trailer and Jaynie ushered him in. It was dark, musty and chaotically littered. It smelled like a troop of cats lived there. He scrunched up his nose.

“Since when did you get a cat?” he asked.

Jaynie did not reply but pushed him down into a sofa. “I’ll get something else to drink,” she said and went into the kitchen to rummage around in the cupboards. Mike settled into the sofa. It was soft. He felt the ceiling above begin to whirl, like the night sky did years ago. He tried to focus on the light in the center of the room, but it was a lost battle. By the time Jaynie returned, clutching a half-drunk bottle of bourbon, Mike was already snoring. He never felt her lean over and kiss him gently on the top of his head or her lips brush over his forehead like a benediction. She snuggled down beside him on the couch and nestled her head against his shoulder. Within seconds she too slept.

* * *

THE SOUND exploded into the front room of the trailer like a bomb going off. The door burst open, half-shattered and hanging off one hinge. A tumble of figures burst through into the room and screamed and shouted as Mike and Jaynie flailed into rude consciousness, untangling from one another on the couch in a whirl of knotted limbs.

“Police! Police! Get down!”

Mike, stunned, looked around at the black-uniformed figures coming towards him, pistols grasped in both hands. He barely registered the sight before a blow caught him on the back of the head and he hit the floor, his mouth open, and tasted the bitter, ashy carpet. He was facedown and he felt a knee plant itself in the middle of his back and his arms hauled forcefully behind him. Then he felt a caress of cold metal around his wrists and heard a faint click. He was handcuffed. He twisted his head to his right and saw that Jaynie lay there too, trussed up like a turkey dressed for a Sunday dinner. She struggled hard, her head rocked from side-to-side and the veins in her neck stood out like pipelines and pulsed beneath her skin. She wailed and screamed, a banshee-like sound, as the police began to search through the trailer.

“Jaynie! Jaynie! It’s all right. Calm down,” said Mike. But she did not hear him. She was frantic and roiled on her belly like a run over snake.

“Better watch that one. She’s feisty,” one of the cops said, as he emptied a cupboard that overflowed with plastic dishes and pots and pans.

“What the fuck is going on?” Mike asked.

One of the cops cast him a sideways glance but did not answer him. Instead he sniffed the air and grimaced. “Sure smells like a meth lab in here,” he said.

Mike closed his eyes. Fuck, he breathed. Then to himself, loudly in his mind, he screamed the words he could not express out loud.

Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

Jaynie did not have a cat. The sour, rotten smell in the trailer was from her cooking up meth. He suddenly thought of her reaction when he came here before, pushing him away, certain of someone else with her. She was not hiding a lover. She hid her drug-making partner.

One of the cops roughly pushed open a door to a back bedroom and the sour smell suddenly got stronger.

“Bingo!” the cop said and held open the door. Mike craned his neck up from the ground and saw a complex tangle of piping and pots, like some crazed hillbilly scientist’s perpetual motion machine.

He turned to Jaynie. She was quiet now and would not look at him. She faced the opposite wall, even when the cops hauled them both roughly to their feet.

“I’ve no idea what this is…” Mike said to the cop who held his arms. But the expression of naked disgust on the man’s face caused the words to evaporate. The cop glanced over at Jaynie.

“We’d heard you’d been hooked up with those Callaghan boys and their crew,” he said. “You’ve had plenty of chances, ma’am. Now it’s time to do a little time.”

They were frog-marched out of the trailer and pushed outside into the bright sunshine. Mike instinctively raised his hands to shield his eyes form the light. But they were caught behind his body by the cuffs and he yelped at the unfamiliar strain in his triceps. Then he was shoved forward to a trio of squad cars parked outside the trailer, like wagons drawn up on the prairie. They were placed in the back of one of them and the car’s engine hummed into life.

Mike stared ahead and his mind whirred with panic. Things had happened so quickly he could barely think.

“Mike… Mike…”

Jaynie sounded desperate and pleading. He turned around. Jaynie looked at him now with eyes full of fear and tears. “I don’t want to go to jail, Mike,” she said.

Slowly, and painfully, she moved her handcuffed hands from out behind her and twisted her back. She inched a finger over to touch his side and rested it there. Mike felt a rage rise inside him. He turned from her and moved away, shifting out of reach of her desperate touch, the gulf between them just inches, but now as uncrossable as an ocean.

* * *

MIKE PUT the phone receiver to his forehead and paused for a moment before dialing the number. He looked around at the bars of the holding cell while three other listless male prisoners returned his gaze. He could not believe his situation. He had one phone call. It felt like a movie even just thinking that. But it was the truth. He was arrested for aiding and abetting the production of illegal narcotics. He told the cops he was just visiting his ex-wife but they seemed uninterested.

“Tell it to the court,” one said.

He dialed a number now and prayed it would not go through to a voicemail. That she would answer. That she would help.

“Hello?”

Dee’s voice never sounded so good. Mike blurted out his story and quickly rattled off his whereabouts and what happened. The entire time he spoke he heard Dee’s measured breathing get a little quicker on the other end of the line. Eventually he finished. There was a pause.

“Just one question, Mike. You were just visiting, right? You’re innocent?”

“Yes!” Mike insisted. “Jesus, Dee. For the past three months I’ve been nowhere that you didn’t know about. I haven’t a spare second to shave, let alone run a fucking drug ring.”

He sounded hysterical, wild even. But then he heard Dee chuckle and her Southern drawl got a little thicker. “Yeah, I guess you have a point, Mike,” she said. “Sit tight there, fella, and try not to get too friendly with anyone in the showers. I’ll see what I can do.”

Mike heard the click of Dee putting down the phone. He felt like he just flung a Hail Mary pass the entire length of the field and was watching the spinning football twirl towards the horizon without the slightest sense whether it would make its target. He slumped onto a bench and held his head in his hands and a tide of despair filled him. He was still like that three hours later when the door to the holding cell opened and a burly cop walked in.

“Sweeney. Your story checks out. You’re outta here,” he said.

Mike got up and stumbled forward. As he walked past the cop the man grabbed his elbow and leaned in close, whispering words with a mix of admiration and envy.

“You’ve got some powerful friends,” he said.

CHAPTER 15

DEE RESTED AGAINST the lamppost on the corner of Main Street and Elm in Manchester and sucked in deeply on her cigarette. She felt the nerve endings jingle in her brain as the nicotine rush hit its target. They lit up one by one as if someone was turning on the Christmas lights. It was early on polling day but she wanted to step outside the campaign headquarters and watch the New Hampshire streets a little.

She leaned against the cold metal, her skin protected by a thick overcoat, and looked at a posse of student volunteers gathered on the opposite side of the street. They carried Hodges’ placards, crudely drawn in crayon that they churned out for weeks in the headquarters like some campaign version of a Chinese sweatshop. Now they waved them high in the air as each car drove down the street and they cheered loudly at any motorist who bothered to press their horn. Many did. It was like the sound of a mini-traffic jam amid the cries and shouts and laughter.

Dee did not allow herself to take that as a sign. Long years in the game told her not to trust things like a straw poll of horn honkers. What she trusted was the poll that landed on her desk last night. It was the final snap shot of the New Hampshire campaign and it spelled out in black and white the one thing they needed to know: Hodges and Stanton were neck and neck. The dirt they poured all over Stanton’s campaign had kept the opposition down. But Hodges was not decisively ahead. He and Stanton were like two fighters in some old cliff-hanger movie. They slugged away at each other on the edge of a chasm and each hoped that only one would topple over, not both. Dee drew in a deep blast of her cigarette and puffed out the smoke until it wreathed around her like an ashy halo and billowed in the freezing air. She had done all she could, she reflected. She knew that. And yet… she hated the thought of getting this close and losing. They had their single piece of glorious luck in Iowa and rode it for all it was worth. Right to this point of potential victory. If they won here, Stanton was firmly on the ropes and headed to South Carolina for a last stand where they could knock her out. But if Stanton won New Hampshire, then the narrative changed. Suddenly she would be the “comeback kid” story for the media to latch onto, fighting off a scrappy but over-reaching interloper.

She watched the students opposite her, fixing on their smiling faces, their sheer joy and belief in what they were doing. She narrowed her eyes and focused in on two girls with their arms wrapped around each other as they held placards in their other hands. They jumped together at each car horn and laughed so hard it looked like they were drunk, despite being just after 7:00 on a freezing January morning.

“High on goddamn life,” Dee muttered and then smiled to admonish herself for a sense of sour envy. “What was that about,
catin
?” she thought. “Come on. Remember why you do this.”

She felt a sudden flash of heat in her hand and instinctively dropped her cigarette butt which had burned down to the filter. She stamped on it to put it out in the slushy snow and headed back to the headquarters where her car was parked. It was time to see her candidate.