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“Was that P.R. bullshit or the truth?”
“I hope to God it’s the truth.”
“When will you be able to see for yourself?”
“She doesn’t look like much now. But in a few weeks…”
He made a vague gesture and slouched down deeper into the chair, stretching his long legs out in front of him. His boots almost came even with Eddy’s polished dress shoes. The jeans Tate had on were at the opposite end of the wardrobe scale from Eddy’s creased and pressed navy flannel slacks.
For the present, Eddy didn’t badger his candidate about his casual attire. The political platform they were building was one that common folk—hardworking middle-class Texans—would adhere to. Tate Rutledge was going to be the champion of the downtrodden. He dressed the part—not as a political maneuver, but because that’s the way he had dressed since the early seventies, when Eddy had met him at the University of Texas.
“One of the crash survivors died today,” Tate informed him in a quiet voice. “A man my age, with a wife and four kids. He had a lot of internal injuries, but they had patched him up and they thought he was going to make it. He died of infection. God,” he said, shaking his head, “can you imagine making it that far and then dying from infection?”
Eddy could see that his friend was sinking into a pit of melancholia. That was bad for Tate personally and for the campaign. Jack had expressed his concern for Tate’s mental attitude. So had Nelson. An important part of Eddy’s job was to boost Tate’s morale when it flagged.
“How’s Mandy?” he asked, making his voice sound bright. “All the volunteers miss her.”
“We hung that get well banner they had all signed on her bedroom wall today. Be sure to thank them for me.”
“Everyone wanted to do something special to commemorate her release from the hospital. I’ll warn you that tomorrow she’s going to receive a teddy bear that’s bigger than you are. She’s the princess of this election, you know.”
Eddy was rewarded with a wan smile. “The doctors tell me that her broken bones will heal. The burns won’t leave any scars. She’ll be able to play tennis, cheerlead, dance—anything she wants.”
Tate got up and went for another two beers. When he was once again relaxing in the chair, he said, “Physically, she’ll recover. Emotionally, I’m not so sure.”
“Give the kid a chance. Adults have a hard time coping with this kind of trauma. That’s why the airline has counselors trained to deal with people who survive crashes and with the families of those who don’t.”
“I know, but Mandy was shy to begin with. Now she seems completely withdrawn, suppressed. Oh, I can get a smile out of her if I try hard enough, but I think she does it just to please me. She has no animation, no vitality. She just lies there and stares into space. Mom says she cries in her sleep and wakes up screaming from nightmares.”
“What does the psychologist say?”
“That dyke,” Tate said, cursing impatiently. “She says it’ll take time and patience, and that I shouldn’t expect too much from Mandy.”
“I say ditto.”
“I’m not angry with Mandy for not performing on command,” he snapped irritably. “That’s what the psychologist implied, and it made me mad as hell. But my little girl sits and stares like she’s got the weight of the world on her shoulders, and that’s just not normal behavior for a three-year-old.”
“Neither is living through a plane crash,” Eddy pointed out reasonably. “Her emotional wounds aren’t going to heal overnight, any more than her physical ones will.”
“I know. It’s just… hell, Eddy, I don’t know if I can be what Carole and Mandy and the voting public need, all at the same time.”
Eddy’s greatest fear was that Tate would second-guess his decision to remain in the race. When Jack had told him that there were rumors in journalistic circles of Tate withdrawing from the race, he’d wanted to hunt down the gossiping reporters and kill them single-handedly. Luckily, Tate hadn’t heard the rumors. Eddy had to keep the candidate’s fighting spirit high.
Sitting forward, he said, “You remember the time you played in that fraternity tennis tournament and won it for us our sophomore year?”
Tate regarded him blankly. “Vaguely.”
“Vaguely,” Eddy scoffed. “The reason the recollection is dim is because you had such a hangover. You’d forgotten all about the tournament and had spent the previous night drinking beer and banging a Delta Gamma. I had to rout you out of her bed, get you into a cold shower and onto the court by nine o’clock to keep us from getting a forfeit.”
Tate was chuckling with self-derision. “Is this story going somewhere? Does it have a point?”
“The point is,” Eddy said, scooting farther forward so that his hips were barely on the edge of the bed, “that you came through, under the worst possible conditions, because you knew you had to. You were the only chance we had of winning that tournament and you knew it. You won it for us, even though minutes before your first match you were massaging your blue balls and puking up two six-packs of beer.”
“This is different from a college tennis tournament.”
“But you,” Eddy said, aiming an index finger at him, “are exactly the same. Since I’ve known you, you’ve never failed to rise to the occasion. Through those two years we spent together at UT, through flight training, through Nam, when you were carrying me out of that goddamn jungle, when have you ever failed to be a fucking hero?”
“I don’t want to be a hero. I just want to be an effective congressman for the people of Texas.”
