Shadowbahn(37)

“Aren’t you the keeper of my cigars?” laughed Jack. “Who’s the keeper of my cigars around here? I guess I have to keep my own cigars from now on.” A phone rang in the suite two rooms away. “Adlai,” said Bobby to the sound.

“Or Dad.”

“Dad . . .”

“Calling as usual to tell us it’s all going to be great, it’s all going to be fine. Just a small obstacle—”

“Ohhh,” Bobby moaned into his hands.

“Adlai wouldn’t be ringing here. Well”—Jack shrugged on second thought—“he might.”

“Should we answer?”

“Of course not.”

“But if it’s Dad?”

“Especially,” Jack answered quietly.

“You’re still singing.”

“Am I? Are you sure it’s me?”

“It’s you.”





[stuck in the groove]


The now former candidate asked, “I mean, why should I be president?”

“Because,” his brother answered, “you’re better than them.”

“Let’s say for the sake of argument I am. What makes me better?”

“Smarter. Tougher.”

A thought flickered across Jack’s mind but he lost its train. “It’s not about smarter and tougher,” he said calmly, “you’re smart and tough enough to know that. It’s not even about wanting it more than anyone.” He pushed his back up from out of the chair and moved slowly, more slowly than he should have wanted anyone to see him move. “Where’s my coat?” he murmured to himself, and his brother didn’t answer because he knew he wasn’t expected to. Moving from one room of the suite to the other, Jack settled into his customary glide, the difficult mobility that he managed to persuade the outside world was grace. Fumbling through his pockets when he found the coat, he pulled out the cigar he had expected to be smoking under other circumstances.

? ? ?

Back in the room with his brother, Jack lit the cigar and stopped to look around the suite, for the first time taking in how empty it was. “Last one.” He raised the cigar to show Bobby but was still really talking to himself, still murmuring. “Now I just need a blonde.” Bobby put his face back in his hands. “It’s about the moment,” Jack continued, “forging itself. From all the previous moments. In the case of an election, say . . .”

My God, thought Bobby in horror, he’s waxing philosophical.

“. . . it’s about everything that the country has been before . . .”

It really was over.

“. . . coming together now to be whatever it will be . . . next. The only argument for making me president is because we’ve never lived in times like these and no one like me ever has been president before. But if we’re not really in times like these—”

“What do you mean if we’re not really in times like these?”

“—if the times aren’t really what we thought they were”—he pointed at the darkened TV—“then Daley and Illinois just say, Fuck Kennedy and let’s go with our own guy even if we already ran him around the track twice against the same Republican—albeit at the bottom of the ticket—who already beat him twice, because at least this time they won’t have the General at the top so maybe it will be different. That’s what they tell themselves, anyway.” His younger brother stared at him blankly. “Part of being great is being lucky.”





[the needle lifted]


Bobby blurted, “Bullshit,” and Jack laughed again. “Bullshit” was downright epithetic for his self-righteous little tough-mick choirboy brother; he wasn’t sure he ever had heard Bob say “bullshit.” But then Bob never had heard Jack sing, so everything was altogether unraveling this afternoon, wasn’t it? and the older one studied the younger awhile. Momentarily jettisoning his usual aversion to reflection, he thought, This is my little brother’s failing, Bobby believes life is supposed to be fair or, if not fair exactly, then serial, consequential, a sequence of things that lead to other things that are led to by the earlier things. Randomness, caprice, the errant happenstance of a shot fired (or not) from a depository window, or a song that falls (or doesn’t) from the sky that changes (or doesn’t) the world and all its possibilities—none of these fit in the little Jesuit’s moral scheme of things. “Why should I be president,” he posed socratically with no heat or reproach, “I who am . . . nothing if not the triumph of somebody else’s idea of our era, somebody else’s idea of what the times are,” except we got you, didn’t we, Jesse? the twin of no possibility. Jack considered his younger brother now. You of all people understand about brothers. “So,” Jack sighed grimly, drawing a final puff on what would have been his victory cigar and finally absorbing the enormity of what had been lost. “I suppose this means my chances of ever f*cking Marilyn have gone out the window.”





no refrain


The songs of American bullets, the choir of American gunfire: As the slug whistles through a Dallas afternoon on its way to the presidential target, does it sing “You Go to My Head”? The music of American murder, which is not to say the music of American murderers, because the murderer himself has no music in him but rather only the melody of his weapon, which is why he loves it so. All the reports of American weapons are dulcet, the murderer loving his weapon for the music of which he himself is humanly empty, not a single refrain to be heard snaking its way from his foul soul to his foul mind to the foul tip of his foul tongue, along the foul passage of his American being.