'Tweeting on Twitter-that's what I'm paying you to do, play on your goddamn phone?'
Still talking to the top of his head.
'You're paying me to win elections, and social networking is another way to connect with voters. Grass roots. So I tweet for you.'
'What am I… what are you tweeting?'
' 'Nine A.M. and at my desk working hard for the people of Texas.'
'
'And they believe that?'
'Your three thousand followers do.'
'I've got three thousand followers? Hey, that ain't bad.'
'Obama's got ten million.'
Bode sighed. 'Figures.'
Jim Bob punched a button on his phone as if firing off a nuclear bomb then raised his head and eyed Bode over his reading glasses.
'Okay… so what's wrong now?'
Like a mother to her child who had come home from school with hurt feelings.
'What makes you think something's wrong?'
'Because you're frowning. Which I find hard to believe, given that you just had sex with a gorgeous twenty- seven-year-old girl. If I had been so lucky this morning, you wouldn't be able to slap the smile off my face for a month.'
Bode tried to block the image of Jim Bob and Mandy having sex from his mind.
'How'd you know we had sex?'
'Because that gal's just naturally horizontal.'
Bode's thoughts drifted back to that morning in bed. He had tried to satisfy his need for excitement with his young aide, but after a year the initial thrill of sex with Mandy Morgan had waned. Sex was much like big-game hunting in that regard. Bode's gaze turned up to the stuffed animal heads that adorned the four walls of his office: axis and mule deer, elk, Catalina goat, red stag, Aoudad sheep, impala, pronghorn, Corsican ram, sable, and his favorite, the wildebeest.
'Remember when I bagged the wildebeest?'
'I do indeed,' Jim Bob said.
Bode and Jim Bob had hunted together since middle school.
'A thousand feet out, one shot to the head.' Bode held an imaginary rifle, sighted in the wildebeest head through an imaginary scope, and squeezed an imaginary trigger. 'Boom.'
'That was a good shot,' Jim Bob said.
'That was a great shot.'
The memory of which almost brought a smile to Bode's face. Almost. But after killing so many creatures, the thrill of the hunt had also waned. The hunts had all started to seem the same. Like sex. There were only so many positions and places to have sex, just as there were only so many creatures to kill. Hunting. Sex. Football. Politics. He had always found fulfillment in those manly pursuits. But now he found himself searching for something more. There had to be something more. He sighed.
'Why am I in this office?'
'It's the Governor's Office. And you're the governor.'
'But why am I the governor?'
'You're a Republican in a red state.'
'No-what is my purpose in being governor?'
'To get reelected.'
Jim Bob choked back a laugh.
'Wait, I lost count-is this your third or fourth midlife crisis this term?'
Jim Bob shook his head then tossed the newspaper on the desk and gestured at the headline: BET ON BODE.
'You're a hard man to please, Bode Bonner. You just won the Republican primary with one hundred percent of the vote, and you're not happy?'
'No one ran against me. Where's the thrill of victory in that?'
The State of Texas had held the Republican and Democratic primaries the day before. But Republicans didn't fight each other in March, and Democrats didn't win in November. The Democrats hadn't won a statewide election in Texas in twenty years. They were that incompetent. That irrelevant. And outside of Austin and a few border counties, statistically insignificant, as the pollsters say. Texas glowed bright red from Amarillo to Brownsville, Texarkana to El Paso; Republicans controlled all three branches of state government. Consequently, the general election was a mere formality, Republican voters rubber-stamping the Republican primary winners. Bode Bonner was as good as reelected for another four-year term. He had been declared the Republican primary winner by eight the night before (the polls had closed at seven), given his victory speech by nine (the party was over by ten), had sex with Mandy by eleven (his wife had left for the airport after his speech), and fallen sound asleep by eleven- thirty. No contest. No agony of defeat for his opponent. No thrill of victory for Bode Bonner.
'You want thrills, go ride a roller coaster. You won. That's all that matters. Like that guy said about football, 'Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing.' '
'Lombardi.'
'Same rule applies to politics. And yesterday goes in the books as a win. A win-win because we saved our campaign funds for the general election.'
'Like that'll be much of a fight.' Bode waved a hand at the newspaper. 'Even the Austin paper figures me for a landslide. And who are the Democrats running against me? A Jewish ex-country-western singer who dresses like Johnny Cash and sings like Dolly Parton. A goddamn serial candidate. He's run for damn near every state office except dogcatcher. He's a political punch line.' Bode threw his hands up. 'Where do they get these people? For Christ's sake, Jim Bob, I'm up fourteen points in the polls.'
'Eighteen.'
Bode sat up.
'You got the new poll numbers?'
'Yep.'
'Did I make the nationals?'
'Nope.'
Jim Bob pulled a thin black notebook from his briefcase-a notebook he guarded with the same paranoia as the army officer guarding the president's case containing the nuclear launch codes-and flipped open the cover.
'But you're kicking ass in Texas. Fifty-nine percent favorable rating across all registered voters-that's your all-time high.'
'What's the breakdown?'
Jim Bob turned the page. 'Anglo males, seventy-one percent favorable. Anglo females, sixty-two percent. African-Americans, seven percent. Mexican-Americans, four percent.' He looked up. 'NASCAR dads and soccer moms, they love you. Not so much the blacks and Latinos.' He chuckled. 'Hell, just be glad the Democrats are running a Jew instead of a Latino. There's not but a dozen Jews in Texas, but there's ten million Latinos.'
'You don't figure they'll vote for him, do you?'
He could hear the hint of worry in his own voice.
'Not a chance.'
And that was the fear of every Republican politician in Texas: Would the Latinos vote? They never had before, but no Republican wanted to be the one who finally brought out the Latino vote-for his Democratic opponent.
'They're waiting for their savior… and they'll still be waiting come election day,' Jim Bob said. 'They won't vote.'
'Thank God.'
Every Texas politician understood a simple electoral fact: Anglos occupied the Governor's Mansion by the leave of Latinos.
