Joe Hill - Horns

The congressman’s girls loved Lee, and when they saw him coming up the walk, they ran straight to him. Kaley put her arms around his neck, and Daley planted a kiss on the side of his face. Twenty-one and tanned and happy, but there had been hushed-up trouble with both: binge drinking, anorexia, a venereal disease. He hugged them back and kidded and promised to come out and play croquet with them if he could, but his skin crawled at their touch. They looked smooth and fine but were as rancid as chocolate-covered cockroaches; one of them was chewing a stick of spearmint, and he wondered if it was to cover up the odor of cigarettes, weed, or dick. He would not have slept with both of them together at the same time in trade for a night with Merrin, who was, in some ways, still clean, still possessed of the body of a sixteen-year-old virgin. She had only ever slept with Ig, and knowing Ig as Lee did, that hardly counted. Ig probably kept a sheet between them the whole time.

The congressman’s wife met Lee at the door, a small woman with feathered gray-and-black hair, thin lips frozen into a stiff smile from all the Botox. She touched Lee’s wrist. They all liked to touch him, the congressman’s wife and his children, and the congressman, too, as if Lee were some totem of good luck, a rabbit’s foot-and he was, and he knew it.

“He’s in his study,” she said. “He’ll be so glad to see you. You knew to come?”

“I knew. Headache?”

“Awful.”

“All right,” Lee said. “No worries. The doctor is in.”

Lee knew where the study was and made his way there. He knocked on the pocket door but didn’t wait to be told to enter before sliding it back. The lights were off, except for the television, and the congressman was on the couch in the dark with a wet washcloth folded into a band and laid across his eyes. Hothouse was on the TV. The volume was turned all the way down, but Lee could see Terry Perrish sitting behind his desk, interviewing some skinny Brit in a black leather jacket, a rock star, maybe.

The congressman heard the door, lifted one corner of the washcloth, saw Lee, and smiled with half his mouth. He dropped the washcloth back into place.

“There you are,” the congressman said. “I almost didn’t leave that message, because I knew you’d worry and come see me tonight, and I didn’t want to bother you on your Friday evening. I take up too much of your life as it is. You should be out on the town with a girl.” He spoke in the soft, loving tones of a man on his deathbed speaking to a favorite son. It was not the first time Lee had heard him talking so, or the first time he’d tended to him while he suffered one of his migraines. The congressman’s headaches were closely associated with fund-raising and bad poll numbers. They’d been coming in bunches lately. Not a dozen people in the state knew it, but early next year the congressman would announce that he intended to run for governor against an incumbent who had won the last election in a landslide but had slid badly in the polls in the years since. Any time her approval rating ticked up more than three points, the congressman needed to dry-swallow some Motrin and go lie down. He had never leaned on Lee’s calm so much.

“That was the plan,” Lee said, “but she bailed on me, and you’re twice as cute, so no loss.”

The congressman wheezed with laughter. Lee sat on the coffee table, cattycorner to him.

“Who died?” Lee asked.

“The governor’s husband,” the congressman said.

Lee hesitated, then said, “Boy, I hope you’re kidding.”

The congressman lifted the washcloth again. “He has Lou Gehrig’s. ALS. Was just diagnosed. There’ll be a press conference tomorrow. They’ve been married twenty years next week. Isn’t that the most awful thing?”

Lee had been ready for some bad internal-polling numbers, or maybe to learn that the Portsmouth Herald was going to run an unflattering story about the congressman (or the girls-there’d been more than a few of those). He needed a moment to process this one, though.

“God,” Lee said.

“What I said. It started with a thumb that wouldn’t stop twitching. Now it’s both hands. The course of the disease has apparently been quite rapid. You know not the day or the hour, do you?”

“No, sir.”

They sat together in silence. The TV played.

“My best friend in grammar school, his father had it,” the congressman said. “The poor man would sit there in his easy chair in front of the TV, twitching like a fish on a hook, and sounding half the time like he was being choked to death by the Invisible Man. I am so sorry for them. I can’t imagine what I’d do if one of the girls got sick. Do you want to pray for them with me, Lee?”

Not even a little, Lee thought, but he got on his knees at the coffee table and put his hands together and waited. The congressman got down on the floor next to him and bowed his head. Lee closed his eyes to concentrate, to work it through. It would boost her approval rating, for starters; personal tragedies were always good for a few thousand sympathy votes. Also, health care had always been her best issue, and this would play into that, give her a way to make the subject personal. Finally, it was difficult enough as it was to run against a woman, hard not to look like a chauvinist, a bully. But running against one who was heroically caring for an infirm spouse-who knew how that would play out over a campaign? Depended on the media, maybe, what angle they decided to work. Was there any angle that didn’t wind up as a net plus for her? Maybe. Lee thought there was at least one possibility worth praying for-at least one way to fix it.

After a while the congressman sighed, an indication that prayer time was over. They continued to kneel together, quite companionably.

“Do you think I shouldn’t run?” the congressman asked. “Out of decency?”

“Her husband’s illness is one kind of tragedy,” Lee said. “Her policies are another. It’s not just about her. It’s about everyone in the state.”

The congressman shuddered and said, “I’m ashamed to even be thinking about it. As if the only thing that matters are my goddamned political ambitions. Sin of pride, Lee. Sin of pride.”

“We don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe she’ll decide she needs to step down to care for him, won’t run next time out, in which case better you than anyone else.”

The congressman shuddered again. “We shouldn’t talk this way. Not tonight. I really do feel indecent. This is a man’s life and health. Whether I decide to run for governor or not is the least important thing in the world.” He rocked forward on his knees, staring blankly at the TV. Licked his lips. Then said, “If she did step down, though, maybe it would be irresponsible not to run.”

“Oh, God, yes,” Lee said. “Can you imagine if you didn’t go for it and Bill Flores was elected governor? They’d be teaching sex ed in kindergarten, passing out rubbers to six-year-olds. Okay, kids, raise your hand if you think you know how to spell ‘sodomy.’”

“Stop,” the congressman said, but he was laughing. “You’re awful.”

“You weren’t even going to announce for five months,” Lee said. “A lot can happen in a year. People aren’t going to vote for her because her husband is sick. The sick spouse didn’t help John Edwards in this state. Shoot, it probably hurt him. He looked like he was putting his career ahead of his wife’s health.” Already thinking that it would look even worse, a woman giving speeches while her husband did a spastic dance in a wheelchair next to the podium. It would be a bad visual, and would people really want to vote for two more years of that on their TV? Or a woman who thought winning an election was more important than caring for her husband? “People vote the issues, not out of sympathy.” A lie; people voted their nerve endings. That was how to fix it, to quietly, indirectly use her husband’s illness to make her look that much more uncaring, that much less like a lady. There was always a way to fix it. “It’ll be old news by the time you get into things. People will be ready to change the subject.”