Shadowbahn(35)

The candidate’s typically cool remove had taken hold. This was the white-heat calm that kicked in when anger or fear or excitement reached critical mass—the protective detachment in an overwhelming situation, from do-or-die presidential primaries to wartime Solomon Islands torpedo-boat mishaps to sleeping with the wrong damned woman. Always in a state of dying, he thought in such situations: It’s only life, which is over soon enough anyway. Moments before, in the suite watching events spiral out of control on television, reflexively the candidate had looked around the room for his younger brother.

? ? ?

It was one of those instances when the two caught each other’s eye and shared a secret understanding. Then he remembered his brother was on the same television screen that set off the uproar. With howls of betrayal and invective escalating among his managers and lieutenants, and with the candidate apparently the calmest man in the room but for the fact he was silently seething, on the TV his brother on the convention floor—amid the Illinois delegation in the process of falling apart—looked up at one of the cameras.





no / yes


Staring straight into the candidate’s eyes from the TV screen, knowing his older brother was watching from the hotel suite three miles away, the younger man had a look on his face that asked, Do you believe this? No, the candidate mouthed silently, then: Yes. Actually I do. I actually do, now that it’s come. I think I knew this would happen all the time. Parting the bedlam with everyone else oblivious to him, he had hobbled on his crutches out to the hotel balcony, the sounds of the city below serene compared to the tumult behind. Twenty-four hours before, the chant of the thousands who surrounded the sports arena where the convention was taking place—We want Stevenson!—could be heard even from here.

? ? ?

Now the candidate felt that consternation roar up behind him from inside the suite when someone opened the balcony door. “It’s Bobby,” he heard over his shoulder, the aide holding the telephone in one hand and the receiver in the other. “Calling from the convention fl—”

“Yes,” Jack said, “I saw him. Just now”—he waved toward the suite—“on television.”

“He’s wondering . . .” The aide trailed off.

“Tell him to come back to the hotel.”

“He says—”

“Just tell him to come back. It’s over.”





the refuted song


There was a pause. “I should tell him that?” the aide choked. “That it’s ov— . . . ?” and he couldn’t finish, and the candidate said nothing more. Fucking Illinois, thought the candidate, his mind free-associating everything from the past four months, if we just had won Wisconsin more decisively, only to dismiss this line of thought: Wouldn’t have made a difference, Wisconsin was a blessing because it made West Virginia necessary, which made the case for his candidacy all the more irrefutable when he won there so commandingly . . . ninety-five percent Protestant! except it wasn’t irrefutable after all, was it? the case for that candidacy being refuted at this very moment . . .

? ? ?

. . . not just refuted but demolished, with all the delegations—Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, California—going to pieces, like the sky. By the time his younger brother returned, the suite had cleared out without anyone saying anything to the candidate they had failed, who still was on the balcony where he had remained nearly an hour, excruciating as it may have been for him to stand so long. Sometimes he peered over the edge at the street below—trucks from the network news, the print press, everything in commotion: They loved me until a better story came along. The candidate snorted. He was detached from this betrayal too, a man who understood expediencies.





the wrecked song


“Where is everyone?” he heard his younger brother say—not so much a question as a livid accusation—in the balcony doorway over his shoulder, where the aide previously had been with the telephone in hand.

“They heard you were coming,” the candidate chuckled. I make them nervous but my black-Irish runt brother f*cking terrifies them. When there was no answer, the candidate turned back to find the doorway empty again, and then returned to the suite to find the other, smaller man slumped in a chair, surrounded by the campaign’s wreckage both literal and figurative.

? ? ?

Phone wires and flyers, empty glasses and cigarette butts sometimes in ashtrays and sometimes on the tables and floors. The gold leaf of the ceiling now dingy, thick carpet pockmarked with stains. “Funny,” the candidate said, “how something can come apart so quickly,” staring at the TV that was dark for the first time in a hundred and thirty hours, a year of work gone in an afternoon . . . well, not one year but four, really—or did he mean a lifetime?

“Funny?” asked his brother hollowly from the chair.

“See that sky?” Jack gestured with his thumb at the balcony behind him. “There’s a piece missing.”





closing track


Bobby glared at him from the chair. Was his big brother being metaphorical now? Ironic? Literary? Did anything other than a spectacular pair of tits unruffle him? Pulling up another chair, the older man sat, leaned forward, put his chin in his hands. “So,” he said, pondering as he would eight years later in the shadows of the Factory, “Adlai again . . .”