One hundred eleven degrees, and it was only the fifth day of July.
Lindsay Bonner had lived in Texas for almost forty years, so she knew heat; but the heat on the border defined heat. The air felt as if it were on fire. She wiped sweat from her face and drank another bottled water. Three hours she had walked the colonia on her morning rounds. She arrived back at the clinic feeling a bit woozy. She opened the door and stepped inside. Inez greeted her, but her words sounded distant. The girl's pretty face seemed vague.
"Doctor!"
Lindsay opened her eyes to Jesse and Inez hovering over her. She was lying on the examining table. Jesse checked her pulse; Inez dabbed her forehead with a cold wet towel.
"What happened?"
"You fainted."
"The heat."
"You are sure you are not pregnant?"
His question made her laugh.
"Only if I'm the Virgin Mary."
They had tried to have a baby for four years, he and Lindsay. But she couldn't get pregnant. Not his fault. His sperm production was stupendous, the doctor had said. Her plumbing was fine. Just relax, it'll happen. It did. Bode would never forget that hot summer day nineteen years before when he had ridden in from the herd and found Lindsay waiting for him by the barn. Crying. He had dismounted and gone to her. He took off his gloves and wiped the tears from her face, sure she was about to tell him she had breast cancer. Instead, she smiled and said, "We're going to have a baby."
That day he had said, "Thanks, God."
Today he said, "Why, God?"
That was still the happiest day of his life. This was not the second happiest day of his life. Bode Bonner's love child. It wasn't fair. Movie stars can have a dozen kids out of wedlock, and no one cares. In fact, they ooh and ahh over their baby bumps at the Academy Awards, as if they're the first women in the whole fucking world to have a baby. But let the leading presidential candidate sire one child- one! — with a woman who wasn't his wife, and you'd think the whole fucking world was ending.
And not just his political career.
Bode Bonner would be laughed out of the presidential race just as John Edwards had been, another cheating politician with good hair. And like all men who had ascribed their sudden success to divine intervention, Bode Bonner's thoughts now focused on one disturbing question: Why would God let this happen to him? To His chosen candidate? He stepped into Jim Bob's office, shut the door, and said, "She's pregnant."
"Good. Maybe she'll come home now."
"Not Lindsay. Mandy."
The news knocked Jim Bob back in his chair as forcefully as a two-by-four across his pasty face-which seemed even pastier now. He didn't speak for a long moment. When he caught his breath and regained his voice, he said, "For Christ's sake, Bode, you never heard of condoms?"
"It was just once."
"You been screwing her for more than a year."
"Once without a condom."
That one time was a problem.
"Why wasn't she on the fucking pill?"
"She said she went off because she was gaining weight, didn't want me to think she was fat."
"And pregnant is better?"
"What are we gonna do?"
He could see the Professor's mind working through the five stages of political grief: anger, acceptance, recovery, strategy, polls.
"Treat it like the deficit: deny, deny, deny."
"That didn't work so well for Clinton, Schwarzenegger, Edwards, Sanford, Weiner…"
"It buys time."
"For what?"
"A mass murder, a war in the Mideast, a plane crash, that Lohan gal to do something stupid… for something else to come along and dominate the news."
"Then what?"
The Professor shrugged. "Standard political sex scandal procedure: confess, cry, seek treatment, promise to be a better man, vote for a liberal spending program."
"I'm not crying on national TV."
"No choice. It's in the playbook."
While Bode considered that spectacle, Jim Bob put his elbows on his desk and his face in his hands. He exhaled like a dying man taking his last breath of life.
"The governor and the governor's wife, both having affairs. That's not in the fucking playbook."
" Both? What are you talking about?"
Jim Bob looked up, as if surprised that Bode had heard his words. But he couldn't maintain eye contact. His gaze dropped to a large envelope on his otherwise bare desk. He reached over as if the act pained him and picked up the envelope. He hesitated, then held it out to Bode. He still did not look Bode in the eye.
Bode now hesitated.
He took a deep breath and the envelope. He opened the flap and reached inside. He removed a stack of photos. Jim Bob's eyes remained down. Bode looked at the top photo then sat down hard in a chair. He thumbed through the photos and saw his wife… with another man… a Latino man… a young, handsome man… sitting on a porch drinking wine
… smiling… laughing… now standing and… dancing. His wife in another man's arms.
"Jesse Rincon," Jim Bob said. "I sent Eddie down there, to check him out."
"Thought he was a gopher."
"He is. He gets what he goes for."
Bode fought not to look at the photos again, but he lost the fight. He now stared long and hard at the images of his wife with another man, but his mind conjured up images of his wife with another man, and he felt a hurt so deep that the images threatened to do what no opposing football player, political opponent, disappointing poll, nasty reporter, or scathing letter to the editor could do: make him cry. But Bode Bonner had become such a consummate politician that he never considered that his own affair might have hurt his wife just as deeply. And made her cry herself to sleep many lonely nights.
"So she's…? He's…? They're…?"
Jim Bob turned his palms up. "He didn't catch them in the act, but you can see for yourself, they've got more than a doctor-nurse relationship. She's living with him… in his guesthouse on his land outside Laredo."
"Jesus. Another man screwing my wife."
"She's a good looking gal, someone ought to be."
"Never figured my wife for that."
"No man does."
Bode again looked at his wife's image in the photos. His smiling wife. He hadn't seen that smile since early in his first term. It was a real smile, not the smile of a politician's spouse. She hadn't been happy as the governor's wife in Austin, but she had found happiness as a nurse in the colonias on the border. With Jesse Rincon. The man who had his wife and now wanted his job. The Professor spoke in a solemn voice.
"So let me sum up the situation for you, Bode: You and Jesse Rincon are now rivals for both the Governor's Mansion and the governor's wife. You're the top Republican contender for the White House, you're being hunted by hit men working for a Mexican drug lord, and your wife is working in a colonia with the man who wants your job and just across the Rio Grande from the man who wants you dead. And if that's not enough, your fucking twenty-seven-year-old mistress is pregnant."
Bode looked up from the photos of his wife to his ace political strategist.
"Jesus, Jim Bob-you can't make this shit up."
"Bode's Babe"… "Bawdy Bode"… "Bonner's Blonde Bombshell." All three network evening news shows led off with the press conference-what, you don't have real news to report? And then the cable talk shows had a field day. They splashed photos of Mandy… Mandy and Bode… Mandy and the Mexican kids… more Mandy. They reported rumors- they had no proof! — about sex in the Governor's Mansion when the governor's wife was out of town. About a possible love child. And where was the governor's wife? Had she left the governor? Is the happily-married-man image just an image? Is Bode Bonner just another two-timing politician not worthy of his wife's trust? Or the American people's trust? How could Bode Bonner be president, a man who had hidden a twenty-seven-year-old mistress from his wife and a twenty-seven-billion-dollar deficit from the voters? On and on they went for hours and hours, until Bode couldn't bear to watch anymore, like watching a train wreck or Romney at a tea party rally. He forced himself to change the channel, but it was even worse. Leno and Letterman both made him the butt of their monologue jokes. He was no longer an American hero. He was the biggest punch line in America.
And his wife was having an affair.