The plane gained speed, the engines roaring faster, then it lifted off the runway, and I felt the weightless, empty feeling of dropping unexpectedly in an elevator as the countryside spread out below us and the blocks of neat houses and rows of trees seemed to shrink away into the earth.
John Williams, I thought. The name. Where?
“What happened to your head?” the Senator said. “I hope you haven’t run into another tennis player with bad aim.”
“A minor car accident.” You shithead, I thought.
“Well, John, this man is going to be the youngest congressman from the state in November.”
Williams nodded and took a sip from his drink. I tried to see his eyes through his sunglasses. John Williams, where did I see the name?
“John’s not from Texas, but he’s a good friend to the party.”
“I see,” I said.
“I’ve had him at the ranch for a few days of shooting. I’m trying to convince him that the only place to build industry today is in the Southwest.”
“A beautiful state,” Williams said. His face was turned to me, but it was impossible to read his meaning or intention.
“Do you mind if I have a drink?” I said.
“I’m sorry, Hack. I usually don’t drink this early myself, and I forget that other people don’t have my same Baptist instincts.” The Senator opened the cabinet door to the bar and folded out a small table from the wall. He picked up three cubes from the ice bucket with the tongs and dropped them into a tall glass and poured in a shot of bourbon.
“I was glad to see you at the airport,” he said. “I thought maybe we were too forceful last Sunday in getting you to come along.”
“Oh, I keep my promises, Senator.”
“We’ll only be there a short while. A couple of the state news services will meet us at the hospital, and then we’ll have dinner and take off again this evening.”
“News services?” I said.
“Yes, the local ones. They usually like to cover this sort of thing for the state television stations.”
“I didn’t know about that.”
“I see you’re a bit new to politics,” Williams said. There was just a touch of a smile at the corner of his mouth, a faint wrinkle in the plastic skin.
“No, no, Hack’s father was a congressman. In fact, a very fine one. It’s just that Hack had some private reservations at first about visiting Walter Reed.”
“Why’s that, Mr. Holland?”
“I suppose it’s connected with superstition. You know, bad luck,” I said.
“Really?” The skin wrinkled again at the corner of his mouth, and he clinked the ice in his glass. I felt the pulse begin to swell in my neck.
“Probably a silly thing, but I never found much pleasure in visiting a veterans’ ward,” I said.
Williams’s face remained opaque as he looked at me, but I saw one finger tighten on his glass.
“Maybe it’s something about the smell of a dressing on a burn. I really couldn’t tell you,” I said.
He continued to stare at me, and I knew that behind those sunglasses his eyes were burning into mine.
“How about another drink, John?”
“I’m fine.”
“I suppose I shouldn’t have brought it up. Actually, Hack was wounded in Korea and spent some time in the V.A. after the war.”
“Is that right, Mr. Holland?”
“It wasn’t of much consequence. A flesh wound. The John Wayne variety,” I said.
“It was a little more serious than that,” the Senator said.
“I’d like to talk with you about your experiences sometime,” Williams said. His voice was as dry as paper.
“They’re not very interesting, but anytime you’re passing through DeWitt County on your way between Washington and L.A., we’ll sure crack a couple of bottles.”
“You’ll see John at my ranch. He visits often,” the Senator said. “Your glass is empty, Hack.”
I wouldn’t have believed it, but the Senator was uncomfortable. His acetylene-blue eyes were bright, and his easy laugh had a fine wire of strain in it. He poured another shot in my glass and pressed the stopper hard in the bottle neck with his thumb. And I began to feel that John Williams was a much more formidable person than I had realized.
“If you continue in politics I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of each other,” Williams said. I could almost taste the bile in his teeth. “It looks like your career is going to be a very good one.”
“I expect that’s one of those things you never know about.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
Again, I couldn’t tell if there was a second meaning in what he said, or if he used deliberate vagueness to keep his opposition full of unspoken question marks. But I did know that the Senator was still sitting a bit forward in his seat, and his thigh muscles were tensed under the crease of his trousers. Yes, there’s a real lesson in this, I thought. Even the predators sometimes have to lie under the reef while the shadows of much larger fish move through the dark waters overhead. I lit my first cigar of the day and squinted at the Senator and Williams through the smoke, and I wondered what umbilical cord connected them.
I didn’t say anything else that would test that delicate pattern of membrane behind the Senator’s healthy smile, and Williams sensed that the match was over. He set his drink on the table, folded his hands on his knee, and looked out the window like a withdrawn demiurge at the pools of fire in the clouds.
Three hours later I was on my fourth bourbon and water as we began our approach to Dulles Airport.
The air in Washington was humid and hazy with smog. There had been rioting in the Negro district off Pennsylvania Avenue during the week, and from the plane I had seen plumes of smoke blowing across the blocks of red-brick tenement buildings toward the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial, that island of green and marble and blue water in the center of a colossal slum. Now, standing on the drive among the potted plants in front of the terminal, I could smell just the hint of burned wood in the air, and my eyes watered in the yellow pall that hung over everything in sight.
The Senator’s chauffeured Cadillac limousine picked us up, and on the way to Walter Reed I fixed another drink from the portable bar built into the back of the driver’s seat. The Senator didn’t like it, but he confined his objection to a steady look at the amount of bourbon in my glass. Williams sat silently on the fold-out seat, his back straight and his face turned indifferently to the window; however, I could feel his sense of superiority in the knowledge that I was starting in heavy on the whiskey. That’s all right, motherfucker, I thought. Wes Hardin and I will kick your ass any day in the light-year you want to choose.
Two television newsmen from Houston and Fort Worth were waiting for us by the information desk in the main room of the hospital. They were both young, dressed in narrow-cut suits and knitted neckties and button-down collars, and their hair looked as though it was trimmed every day. They had been leaning against the counter with their cameras hanging loosely in their hands, and when they saw the Senator they snapped into motion and came toward us with their leather soles clicking on the marble floor. Their college-boy faces showed the proper deference and energetic respect, and I thought, Ahhh, there are two young men who will never live within breathing distance of the Fort Worth stockyards.
Three hospital administrators joined us, and we began our tour of the wards holding the Vietnam wounded. I had a fair edge on from the whiskey, but now I wished that I had made a bigger dent in the bottle. The beds, with high metal rails on the sides, stretched out in long rows, and the afternoon sun slanted across the bodies of the men under the sheets. I had made a cynical remark to Williams about the smell of a dressing on a burn, but that was only part of it. The astringent odor of the antiseptic used to scrub the floors mixed with the reek of the bedpans, the sweaty and itching flesh inside the plaster casts, the urine that sometimes dried in the mattress pads of the paraplegics, and the salve oozing from bandages that covered rows of hard stitches. There was another odor in the air, too, one that might be called imaginary, but I could smell the distant rain forests and the sores that formed on men’s bodies from living in wet uniforms and in boots that hardened like iron around the feet. The stench
