“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.