The Race (9 page)

Nor did she mesh well with Corey's family. Not that this would have been easy: Hank Grace was still the burly and suspicious man who drank too much and spoke too little; Nettie still reacted to her husband as warily as she did to life outside the narrow confines of the known. But, to Corey, Clay was a surprise.

Twelve years younger, Clay owed his existence to a failure of birth control, and seemed to view his place in the world as equally tenuous. To Corey's amazement, Clay's bedroom was a virtual shrine to his older brother, jammed with Corey's high school trophies, pictures of Corey in uniform, news clippings of his return. When Corey had first seen this, he had turned to Clay with an ironic comment on his lips, then stifled it—in his brother's large blue eyes, he saw a boy far too sensitive for the tough humor of a cardboard hero.

At sixteen, Clay was suspended between gangly and sinewy and, Corey suspected, between identities. Clay seemed to have tackled every high school enterprise Corey had mastered—athletics, dramatics, and student office—with great determination, but much less success. Still, in Corey's estimate, becoming his avatar gave Clay a serviceable interim identity, though it could not insulate his brother against the harsh judgments of their father. "The boy tries," Hank Grace told Corey with mild disdain. "But Clay will never be like you."

"_I_ wasn't me," Corey said, "until my plane ran out of fuel and I got myself captured by the Iraqis. I just hope Clay doesn't have to kill someone before you learn to love him."

That Corey was referring to Joe Fitts was something Hank would never know. Perceiving that, in a fundamental sense, both Clay and he had always lacked a father, Corey set out to be, at least, a good brother. Despite Corey's busy schedule, he and Clay played catch and shot baskets together, those male rituals that do not require talk to communicate caring. "Time for us to catch up," Corey said laconically. "When
I
was seventeen, you were five, and a football would have knocked you over."

Clay soaked up this attention. His bright smile came more often in Corey's presence, and his own sly humor began emerging. "It's like eating with cavemen," Clay said of dinner hour with their parents. "Only without the dialogue."

But with his peers, especially girls, Clay himself seemed at a loss for words. Entering his senior year, he was similar to Corey only in the fierceness of his newly declared ambition to enter the Air Force Academy. "It's a hard life," Corey pointed out. "Even harder on families."

"I want to fly," Clay answered simply. "Like you did."

That his tone made it sound less like a passion than an escape struck a chord in Corey—though whether Clay was escaping his parents or himself, his older brother could not tell.

HIS MOTHER HAD wanted Clay to attend Carl Cash University.

"What the hell is that?" Corey had inquired of Clay. "A school for Bible-thumpers or snake handlers?"

"Both," Clay snorted. "It's in South Carolina, and they believe that God created the world in a week. But even better is what they don't believe in: drinking, smoking, dancing, or interracial dating."

"What about interracial lynchings?" Corey asked.

But religion, Corey swiftly learned, was no laughing matter—either in his parents' home or, increasingly, in his travels around the state.

As a speaker, Corey was natural and engaging, able to slide by on patriotic boilerplate while he boned up on the issues and built relationships with the party faithful. Despite his success, he wondered at his motives. Would his ascension to the Senate, if it occurred, be a fluke—an ironic and ultimately empty reward for having ignored Joe Fitts's plea—or would it serve some higher purpose? One night, fielding questions at a Kiwanis meeting in Chillicothe, Corey encountered a woman quite certain of what that purpose should be. "To serve God," the woman told him flatly.

Eyeing those around her, Corey felt more perplexed than his audience appeared. "There are many ways to serve God," he parried politely. "In what way do you mean?"

"God's way," the woman said, with a touch of impatience. "To run our government according to a literal interpretation of the Bible. It's like the Reverend Christy says—if it's good enough for God, it's good enough for the United States of America. You were saved for a reason, Mr. Grace—to save America from sin."

"Did I get by with her?" Corey asked Hollis Spencer as they drove away.

His new campaign manager slumped back in the passenger seat, gazing upward as though communing with a deity he could only dimly see. The silence grew; at first, Corey took this to be the musings of a veteran political strategist who had taken Corey on as a favor to the party and was still unsure of what lay behind his eminently salable surface.

"Who knows," Hollis said at last. "But I'm seeing more people like this woman, who only care about right-to-life, prayer in school, banning sex education, teaching creationism instead of evolution, and, for some weird reason, the right to bear arms. Turns out Jesus was a gun nut." When Hollis turned to Corey, his face was grim. "I'm beginning to think you'll draw a primary opponent—a Christian conservative who speaks this woman's language. You don't meet the Reverend Bob Christy's litmus test."

"Who the hell," Corey inquired in exasperation, "is Bob Christy?"

Hollis gave him a pitying smile. "Ask your mother, Corey. She'll know."

"THE REVEREND CHRISTY," Corey's mother informed him after the prayer with which she now began each meal, "saved my life."

Bob Christy, it transpired, had a daily television show that emphasized personal stories of redemption inspired by belief in an inerrant God. And as crabbed as Corey found his mother's worldview, he noted that she now dealt with the life fate had given her a good bit more serenely.

"The Reverend Christy," Corey contented himself with saying, "may want to save the state of Ohio from me."

"Then you should ask yourself why," his mother responded primly.

Janice silently stared into the middle distance, as if she had discovered herself in an insane asylum that made her dreary job in the Lake City Library seem like a work-release program. Hoping to please his wife, Corey took Kara to a nearby park after dinner, first reminding Janice that life in the nation's capital would prove far more enriching. "With you running back to Ohio every weekend?" Janice asked. "What about pacifying the Reverend Christy and his followers? You only get to stay in Washington if the home folks send you back."

It was true, Corey conceded to himself as he and Clay, who had come along, pushed the subdued Kara on a swing until Clay's failed attempts to "catch" her elicited peals of laughter. "You're a better dad than I am," Corey told him dryly. "If you ever learn to make your bed, you'll make some lucky woman absolutely ecstatic."

"Can't I be like you," Clay asked, "and make a few unlucky girls ecstatic first?"

Corey put his arm around his brother. "All in due time," he said in his most avuncular manner. "First you have to call them."

But Clay, as Corey remarked to Janice, seemed to be long on theory. And the night before Clay's first date, a tragedy occurred, one so traumatic that the cancellation of the dance was as inevitable as it was trivial: the murder of Clay's favorite teacher, Vincent Morelli, by one of Clay's own classmates.

IT HAD HAPPENED after dark. Johnny Wall, a burly football player, told the police that Mr. Morelli had lured him to the wooded recesses of Taylor Park with promises of marijuana, and then solicited oral sex. The fatal beating, Johnny insisted, was fueled by shock and fear, and only after Morelli had touched the crotch of his blue jeans. But the police found no marijuana. Instead, their search yielded a discarded wad of twenty-dollar bills; the autopsy revealed traces of semen in the teacher's mouth and throat. The only rational conclusion, Corey suggested over dinner the following evening, was a transaction between buyer and seller that had spiraled into an incendiary self-disgust.

"What does it matter?" Hank Grace bit off each word. "He chose the wrong kid and got himself killed. Good riddance."

Clay stared at the table, his jaw clenched tight. "Are you saying Morelli deserved to be murdered?" Corey asked their father.

"I'm saying he took his chances, and that it's better this fairy's dead than teaching in our school. But now, they're giving him a funeral at the Catholic church like he's some kind of martyr."

Janice studied Corey's father as if he were a specimen on a slide, while his mother clasped her hands in an attitude of prayer. "Not a martyr," Corey responded evenly. "Just dead."

Hank Grace shook his head. Eyes on the table, Clay murmured, "I'm going to Mr. Morelli's funeral."

"Clayton," his mother said in quiet reproof, "you don't want to be seen as approving of such a thing. Homosexuality is a sin."

"So's murder." Clay's voice trembled faintly. "I don't like fairies, either. But I don't think you can judge a good man by the worst thing he ever did."

This simple statement induced a merciful silence. Across the table, Corey regarded Clay with new respect.

But, for the Grace family, this was not the end of the matter. Two weeks later, Corey's new primary opponent appeared at a rally in Taylor Park organized to support Johnny Wall. Far more surprising—and, to Nettie Grace, gratifying—was the identity of the principal speaker: the Reverend Bob Christy himself.

BORDERED BY THE verdant woods that had proven lethal to Vincent Morelli, the grassy expanse of Taylor Park encircled a filigreed white gazebo, a self-conscious but charming piece of Americana that always featured a local band on the Fourth of July, and around which several hundred people had now clustered to hear from the Reverend Christy.

Standing with his parents and brother, Corey appraised the crowd. The younger, more caustic Corey might have seen sheer meanness beneath the Rockwellian veneer, smug citizens drawn by mindless fervor to hear a charlatan dispense pieties that, to the unthinking, might somehow pass for thought. But now the more reflective man saw a tapestry of different needs and motives. Many who had gathered, like his mother, surely felt that Bob Christy had made their lives more hopeful, summoning a higher purpose from the random or mundane. Others—like his senior-prom date, Kathy Wilkes, glancing sideways at Corey as she held her newborn son—were no doubt moved by an emotion their teenaged selves would never have imagined: the countless ways adults learn fear by having their own children. Still others, Corey knew, were drawn by the murder itself, some by anger or hatred. But many more had come out of loyalty to Johnny Wall and his parents, or out of sheer bewilderment at what had befallen him, or might next befall someone they loved.

Last were the foot soldiers of the Christian Commitment—the nationwide group newly formed by Bob Christy to fuse political action with his brand of Christianity, and who now formed a base of support for Corey's opponent in the primary election. Their placards momentarily discarded, they knelt in a circle, praying. Glancing toward his mother, Corey saw her regard them with an expression close to longing: but for the fissures within her family, Nettie would have joined them.

Clay, too, was observing Christy's followers. "What did you ever do to
them
?" he asked.

"Not be one of them," Corey answered. "Seems that's all it takes."

THE SPEAKERS WHO preceded Christy were a disparate lot: Johnny Wall's father, so mortified that he drew the audience closer; then Johnny's lawyer, whose attempted sound bites were marred by the odd malapropism; then Corey's primary opponent, George Engler, a real-estate agent from southern Ohio with a Chamber of Commerce assurance that, Corey judged, would translate best in small groups of the like-minded. But Engler seized the chance to associate himself with the Reverend Christy through a florid introduction that somehow glorified them both. "I am truly humbled," Engler concluded, "to introduce a man as central to my family as he is to the moral life of America—a man whose mission it is to bring
all
families closer to our God until we become, in his own eloquent words, 'a nation with the soul of a church.'"

The Reverend Christy, Corey perceived at once, was a natural.

Corey had watched him briefly on television: humorous, affable, and yet imbued with a certainty that could infuse his tone with steel, Christy had seemed so three-dimensional that he almost popped through the screen. In person, his tall, bulky form prowled the gazebo with a caged energy and yet surprising grace, his resonant voice an instrument with as many notes as the man had moods—passion, scorn, tenderness, love, and longing for transcendence. Christy could recite the list of ingredients on a cereal box, Corey judged, and move most listeners to rapture—his own mother's eyes had taken on a sheen of wonder. But most impressive to Corey was that Bob Christy seemed to mean every word, including those calculated to short-circuit Corey's career in politics.

"There are those," Christy informed the audience, "who believe that Christian principles have no place in our government—"

"No!"
one of his followers called out.

Smiling, Christy held up a hand. "Many are good people who sincerely feel that God's kingdom resides in the air, or in a church, or in our homes—but that our
schools,
or our
Congress,
are not the Lord's domain. But too many others, by mere silence, lend aid and comfort to this misguided mode of thought.

"I'm not here for political reasons. I'm here with all of you to stand up for Johnny Wall and, through Johnny, for all young men endangered by predators—even the very teachers to whom we entrust their minds—who would enlist them in a lifestyle that steals their souls and takes their lives."

"Sound attractive?" Corey murmured to Clay. But although their father was scowling with the displeasure he felt at being forced to suffer anyone's high-flown sentiments, Nettie Grace was nodding, a reflex of which she seemed unconscious.

Microphone in hand, the Reverend Christy paused to survey his audience, many drawing closer, a few casually sprawling on blankets. "What moral leader," Christy demanded to know, "can remain mute in the face of such a scourge? And yet George Engler's opponent in the Republican primary chooses silence, even when this terrible perversion comes to his very doorstep."