A short story from Doug Dorst’s forthcoming collection, The Surf Guru, our Rumpus Book Club pick for July.
The candidate is so tense he cannot walk without crutches. Renata grimaces as she walks behind him through the hotel lobby. Her job is to make him glimmer, and she has been in the election racket long enough to know that when the legs fail, the heart soon follows.
He enters the warm whoosh of the revolving door and fumbles his crutches. The tip of one catches in the door behind him, and the door jars to a stop, trapping him inside. Renata watches through the glass that separates them as he tugs and tugs on the crutch, watches his face darken and puff with toddler frustration. She sighs, then pushes backward on the door, using all her weight to create an inch of space that frees both crutch and man.
He galumphs out through a receiving line of three slouchy bellhops in brass-buttoned red uniforms and incongruous fezzes and makes his way to the rented yellow bus. The door of the bus creaks open, cranked by the driver, who doubles as the campaign’s district coordinator of yard signs. (There are few yards in the district, which is relentlessly urban, but the candidate does not find this problematic. His logic, Renata knows, can be idiosyncratic.)
They have a long night ahead, a night of riding in the yellow bus beneath the arc lights of the city. Renata has disapproved of the bus from the beginning. It reeks, she believes, of pale and bloodless populism; it is a desperate, flailing stab at aw-shucks bonhomie, and it is doomed to fail, message-wise. The bus is also a fat, slow-moving target for scorn and bullets, and the campaign has already endured much of both. (Sixty-two bullets, by her count. The scorn is unquantifiable.) But the candidate insisted. “Everyone loves school buses,” he said. “We all rode them and sang the same bus songs.” Such dreamy evocations of youth are part of his voter appeal, which is limited but passionate. He plays well among registered voters who self-identify as seeking that which cannot be reclaimed.
So, this bus. Idling in a blue diesel haze, it looks as ragged as the baggy-eyed, sag-cheeked candidate himself. Inside, dried gum polka-dots the floor, duct tape has been peeled away from green vinyl seat backs to reveal filler that looks disturbingly like hair, seat cushions are minefields of sprung coils. She smells an exhaust leak, imagines her lungs turning shriveled and blue.
She and the candidate share a seat, and they lurch forward together as the driver pops the clutch and stalls out. He stammers out an apology to them and jerks the bus into traffic. Angry horns blare all around them. (Seven horns, she counts; seven new votes for the opponent.)
They rattleclank and rumblebump through the city, potholing with great frequency. The district coordinator of yard signs is a terrible driver.
West of Main and south of Jefferson, they stop for a photo op at a day-care center. The bus unloads them in a weedy, cracked-concrete playground, where a dozen small children run in circles in the failing light, all shrieks and pounding feet and corduroy squeaks. One boy, freckled and lean and exuding the mirthless aggression of a bully, runs past the candidate and kicks out one of the crutches, sending it scuttering across the macadam. The candidate wobbles but does not fall, thank god, and as he clings to his remaining support, Renata looks daggers at the boy. The boy stops in his tracks, chastened and submissive. He retrieves the crutch and hands it back to the candidate, who tousles the boy’s hair and calls him scamp.
The press, unfortunately, is nowhere to be seen. She hands disposable cameras to the center’s staff: two spent-looking and gray-skinned women who reluctantly stub out their cigarettes to accept the gifts. “For posterity,” she tells them.
“Who’s Posterity?” one woman says, but she doesn’t wait for an answer. The two of them snap pictures as the candidate hands out green lollipops to the children. One little girl bursts into tears, and the candidate looks to Renata with the expression of a drowning man. Renata kneels next to the girl, asks her what’s wrong. The girl says she doesn’t like green. The candidate looks hurt. Green is his favorite.
Renata asks if she can keep a secret, and the girl snuffles and nods. Renata tells her that her green lollipop isn’t green at all, it’s a special new kind of lollipop that looks green and tastes green but is really red. “Really?” the girl asks, and Renata says, “Really,” and the girl skips away, happy again. Renata looks to the candidate, expecting to find gratitude. Instead, he looks at her with hangdog credulity: a special new kind of lollipop? Why didn’t she tell him they had one? And why on earth did she give it away?
Back on the bus. Renata watches as the candidate smiles and waves to the people outside. The sky darkens to purple-black and he waves. Traffic thins and he waves. The law-abiding return to the fragile safety of their apartments and he waves. Crotch-stained drunks teeter in front of liquor stores and he waves. Floppy-jean homeboys flip him the bird and he waves. He waves and waves even when no one is in sight, waves to televised ghosts flickering behind slatted blinds and iron bars, to lampposts and their bright sodium moons, to traffic signals winking amber, to retracted awnings and squat blue mailboxes and bags of trash left out for morning pickup.
The bus stops at a red light. On the sidewalk is a street singer, a bone-thin white kid with a face picked raw by speed-freak nails. He is spitting rapid-fire rhymes in a jagged tenor, punctuated by harmonica lines that punch and squawk and accuse and cry. His shoulders twitch and jerk. At his feet is a cigar box with its lid open; a few coins gleam like miracles in the streetlight. Renata wants to stay and listen, wants to fill his box with coins and tell him that he is beautiful—or someday may be, at least—and that his music, though dissonant and violent and frantic, is in a way beautiful and he has made the world more beautiful than it seemed moments ago (which is to say, wholly unbeautiful, beautiless, beautiempty, beautibereft), but the traffic light turns green, and the bus lurches forward and belches a diesel cloud, and the kid and his music are lost in the engine rumble and the whine of wheels.
She looks at the candidate. His eyes are closed and his head bobs up and down; he is lost in a different rhythm, in a song that, from first note to final echo, exists only in his own head. He soon falls asleep, his forehead resting against a window scratched with childish obscenities: i did heidi g and fat larry fucks ass and assorted stick figures sporting inflated cocks that remind Renata of birthday-clown balloons. She covers him with the powder-blue blanket she carries everywhere in a canvas tote bag. These days he seems to doze off before finishing anything.
There is a snap and a crack and a pop as a bullet passes through the bus, in one shatterproof window and out another. Renata pulls the candidate into her lap, shields him with her own body. He stirs. “Thank you,” he says into her skirt.
At the hotel is a phone message from her sister, a woman who has a gated estate and four gifted-and-talented children and a husband in perfect prostate health and yet still clutches to the sisterly rivalry of their teenaged years. Looks like you hitched your wagon to the wrong horse this time¸ the message says, the sneer in the words amplified by the desk clerk’s meticulous script. What her sister does not understand is that none of Renata’s horses are the wrong ones. Renata does not lose. Never has. This is why she is sought after, consulted, handsomely compensated, kowtowed to at pancake-and-prayer breakfasts.
With the candidate safely in bed, Renata reads his draft of the speech he will give at tomorrow’s fund-raiser with the riverboat-casino kingpins. She is shocked; his mind has slipped even further than she thought. In strong black ink he has written at the top of the first page: America. It is indescribable. It is so vast that even if we could grasp It by the lower jaw and wrench Its head free, we still could not fathom It. Then thirty minutes’ worth of delusions and outrage and paranoia. The conclusion, double underlined: America is in trouble today not because Her people have failed, but because She is a voluptuary, screwing everything in sight. Because Her shot of nostalgia was administered with a tainted needle. Because tomorrow it will rain and We will die. She sighs and opens a fresh notebook. Words spill from her as soon as pen touches paper. It is effortless; she is just the medium, the translator, the messenger’s messenger.
Seventeen cigarettes, six cups of coffee, and two bowls of frosted cereal later, she is finished. She reads over her work with pride. She has assembled all the right words in their ordained ritual fashion: compressed nuggets of ideas and opinions and stances, crunchy and wholesome, glazed with a honey-sweet slurry of metaphor suited to the crowd: “chance” and “fate” and “the inside straight,” “split the aces” and “double down,” “loosest slots” and “five-percent vig,” “boxcars” and “baccarat” and “a hard ten on the hop.” It’s a winner. She’d bet her life on it.
The next day, it rains.
A red tarp has been stretched over the deck of the riverboat. Hundreds of chairs are filled with the polyestered bottoms of men and women who fix the odds on slot machines and break the thumbs of card counters. A brass band plays a Sousa march. The tarp billows in the breeze.
Renata takes her place in a chair beside the dais. She is sleep-deprived and feels cotton-headed from seasick pills—she is not one for the water. She watches the small group of supporters gathered on the pier behind crowd-control barricades. Some hold umbrellas and/or children. Some hold home-painted signs, most of which—though her tired eyes can’t read clearly at this distance—appear to lack both verbs and sense. God Country Pie, one seems to say. Others: We People Order Form; Leadship Tomorrow; Valley Shadow Oil Rod; and, curiously, Canidate. She listens as raindrops paradiddle on the red plastic above her head, barely notices as the candidate crutches past her and takes his place at the lectern. The band stops, but the tuba player misses the cue and blats out an unaccompanied B-flat.
The candidate comes across as a new man. Invigorated by the words she has fed him, he delivers the lines impeccably—some incantatory, some gruffly barked, some lilting along with the bob of the riverboat itself. Renata, seduced by her own words, has to stop herself from mouthing along. His skin shines with the fervent sweat of a revivalist. Someone says hallelujah; someone answers with amen.
After a final fist in the air, he casts away his crutches and hops down from the dais to the deck, as if he has been healed by his own spirit. There are handshakes and thumbs-ups, ties beating frantic semaphores in the wind, applause like cannon fire. The sun comes out, as if on cue, and casts a blush of red light over everyone.
Renata checks her watch. Five minutes to absorb the glow, then the moorings will be untied and the paddle wheel will turn and they will power down the river while lunching belowdecks. She hopes he does not overeat; at three-thirty he must Charleston at the senior center. She relaxes, lets her head swim freely.
She does not notice the youth lurking in the gangway. He jumps into the candidate’s path, brandishing a sword as rusty as the ideology he will later profess to the TV cameras. As the sword cuts its arc through the air, the candidate’s legs freeze; his head turns, looking for Renata, begging for direction. But what can she say? Run? Get away?
The hack is a savage one. The candidate slumps to the whitewashed deck. His mouth opens and closes without a sound. The horror—or the revelation, she can’t tell which—in what she is witnessing is this: the motion looks purely mechanical, a clockwork of mandible and maxilla winding down, coming to rest at half-past-gape.
Renata weaves past the writhing pile of men that pins the assassin to the deck. She pushes numbly through the people who, crying and shouting, surround the candidate. As she kneels in the pooling blood, she sees something rise from the corpse, something curling like smoke in the red light. It plumes straight up to the tarp, then winds outward and escapes into sky, tracing a shape that reminds her of a calla lily blossom. She tilts her head and watches, a strange calm warming her like bathwater. She does not feel herself being jostled, does not hear the keening of grief and the roar of panic; still kneeling, she watches as the candidate blooms into mystery, into romance and tragedy, into something she can make holy.
***
Join The Rumpus Book Club by July 1 to receive an advance copy of The Surf Guru.
Originally published in McSweeney’s 10.
