Somebody was poking me in the shoulder. As I slowly opened my eyes, I saw Peter Martin, Washington bureau chief of the Boston Record, quickly backing up from my bedside.
"You're awake," he said, in a tone that pretended to be matter-of-fact, but knowing him as I do, I knew to be anything but. "You all right?"
I didn't know. I didn't even know where I was. On the bedside table to my right, a laptop computer sat open and all fired up. Beside it was a large bouquet of yellow and red flowers, and beside that was an oddly shaped plastic cup with a handle that, it occurred to me even in my groggy state, I might soon be expected to urinate in. Outside the big window, it was dark, so I assumed it was night. Can't get anything by me.
I'm a reporter, so I figured I'd ask the questions, beginning with the obvious. "Where am I?"
"Oh boy," Martin said, shaking his head, then looking toward the door nervously, like maybe he should summon help. "You're at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. You know what you're doing here?"
I said, "Just help me out for a minute. I've been shot, right? Tell me what happened. Is Hutchins dead?"
Martin's never really been one to trot around the issues, and just because I was in a hospital, strapped to blinking machines that seemed to be sending all sorts of fluids coursing through my body, he wasn't about to start now.
"Jack, I hate to do this, but it's deadline. It's Thursday night, eight o'clock. The national desk up in Boston is screaming. You were a witness to an assassination attempt on the president of the United States in the middle of a cutthroat campaign, and we all thought it might be kind of nice to put this into a story."
Attempt. He said "attempt," so Hutchins wasn't dead, which was good.
Neither was I, which, for me, was even better.
"Look, Peter, I'll do what I can. But before I do anything, fill me in. What am I doing here? What the fuck happened? Is Hutchins all right? Am I all right?"
Martin seemed to like that I was getting angry, evidenced by the look of relief that spilled all over his face. "Good, good," he said, as if to himself. "This is going to work out fine. Here's what I know, which isn't much. I'm counting on you to tell me more.
"You were out playing golf with the president early this morning. By the way, Appleton"-the editor in chief of the paper-"is curious as to exactly why you were doing that. So am I. Anyway, you're on the sixteenth hole. Evidently, the two of you were in a sand trap getting some little clinic from this pro golfer, I don't know his name. All of a sudden, you're shot.
"The FBI is saying that it was some militia member, disguised as a maintenance worker at the course, who pulled out a Colt.45 and shot you from the other side of the fairway. He wasn't a very good aim, luckily. The first bullet hit your club, ricocheted off, then grazed Hutchins's shoulder. A second shot struck you in the ribs. I think it broke your rib bone, or severely bruised it, but I'm no doctor. One of these typical situations when an inch either way and you're dead now.
All I know is, the diagnosis is good, and you're expected to be out of here within a couple of days."
With that, Martin looked nervously at the door again, lowered his voice a bit, and said, "They really don't even want me in here now, so we should try to be as quick as possible."
"How is Hutchins?" I asked.
"He's fine. A slight shoulder injury, and now the guy's a national hero. A local paramedic told a network television crew that as they were loading him into the ambulance, he looked at them with a wide grin and said, "What kind of jerk would shoot me right in the middle of the best round of golf of my life?" He's been slipping in the public polls for days, but now analysts are saying this shooting could win him the election. The guy's being talked about like a battlefield hero."
More and more, the scene was coming back to me-the loud cracks, Hutchins falling in a heap on a brilliant morning, the frenzy of activity, the piercing scream. "Jesus, how's Skeeter Davis, the golfer?" I asked, assuming he was the one who screamed. "He dead?"
"Dead? God no. I think he turned an ankle running for cover. He wasn't even hit."
"What happened to the shooter?" I asked, again, remembering another scream and late shots.
"Dead. Secret Service says he pointed a gun at one of their agents, and they mowed him down. Six bullets, I think, all of them in the head. This is a no-shit crew."
Martin was getting increasingly nervous, looking at the door, at the computer, at his watch, and at me, like some sort of caged animal.
He's anxious by nature, but usually it's on his turf. Slightly bookish, with the soft, pasty look of someone whose father was a dermatologist constantly preaching the evils of the sun, he knows Capitol Hill front and back. He knows things about the budget process that cabinet secretaries don't know. He knows the ages of all nine Supreme Court justices and the years they were appointed. He can cite election statistics dating back to Eisenhower's first term. In a city where most bureau chiefs survive on brass and television appearances, Martin is the opposite. He survives on his brains and his willingness to work. But this was an assassination attempt, a glorified police story, and Martin really didn't have a clue.
"If you're well enough," he started, looking tentatively toward the door again, "we'd like a first-person account of what happened out there. It's a blockbuster. Biggest event in the world, and no one else will have what we have."
As Martin talked, a self-important young man in a navy blue suit strode through the door and abruptly asked, "Is your telephone not hooked up?"
I was fortunate enough to be born with a virtually bottomless reservoir of aggravation, which I dipped inffto shoot him a look that should have stopped him dead in his tracks, though perhaps I shouldn't have been thinking in those terms on that specific day. He ignored it and quickly came around the bed to the phone, where he held up the disconnected telephone cord in the air, glanced angrily at me as if I had crossed him in some way, and plugged it back into the wall. Almost immediately, it rang.
"For you," he said.
Through the earpiece, a voice boomed out. "Jack, Jack, that you? For chrissakes, I'm five pars into the best nine holes of my life, and some horse's ass feels the need to take a potshot at us. What the hell is that all about?" Then came the sound of loud, wheezing laughter.
It was Hutchins. I'll be damned if I'm not the quickest thinker I've ever met, especially under duress. I motioned to Martin for a pen, and he searched furiously through a shoulder bag for a legal pad and a writing instrument, placing them carefully in my lap.
"I think that was my club pro, Mr. President, ticked off that you were taking me to the cleaners." I had a passing thought that maybe I shouldn't be joking with the president about killing him, not now anyway. No matter. I heard him cough, then laugh into the phone.
"You all right?" he asked, but didn't pause for an answer. "You ought to see this getup up here. It's a goddamned presidential suite, right here in the hospital. You should come up. My doctors, they think they're my mother. They won't even let me out of bed, and I've got a campaign to wage and an election to win."
I asked, "Mr. President, have you talked to the press yet?"
"The hell with that," he said. "Turn on CNN. My doctor's mugging for the cameras right now. He thinks he's Robert fucking Redford. They're showing your picture all over the place. I have Dalton"-Royal Dalton, his press secretary-"issuing a statement from me."
As I was shaking off the grogginess and moving around my bed, it struck me just how much pain I was in. My ribs felt like they were about to snap, and even normal breathing began to hurt. My arms throbbed from all the needles and heavy tubes sticking in them. My lips were so dry they were flaking, and I was near desperate for a drink of water.
But journalism is a funny business, and not in a humorous kind of way.
There is no sympathy, only opportunity, and the fact that I was laid out in a hospital bed in Bethesda, Maryland, with a bullet hole in my chest and an injured rib that probably meant the difference between life and death was seen by my superiors as a major boon for the paper, and probably for me. And lying there, I began to see it that way myself.
"Mr. President, you mind if I throw a few questions at you for tomorrow's story?"
"You're in a goddamned hospital bed, and you're writing a story for tomorrow morning's paper?" Hutchins asked, incredulous. "Jesus Christ, you guys just don't give it a rest, do you? But what the hell, we're in this together. Fire away."
With that pun, he burst out laughing, then quickly calmed himself down.
I proceeded to ask him a series of about half a dozen questions, and he easily, even poignantly, answered each one as I scribbled notes until I thought my throbbing arm might fall off. I had to give him credit: still lying in a hospital bed, he already had the patter of a reluctant hero. "They can shoot at me every day, until my last day in office, but I'll never bow to these haters and all that they represent."
I asked him about the likely impact on the election, which was only twelve days away. "Look," he said, "my doctors, my security team, they're telling me I'm going to be confined to the White House. Hear me clear right now. That's not going to happen. I was supposed to be in Baltimore, then St. Louis this afternoon. I'll be back on the stump, if not tomorrow, then Saturday. The American people have a right to see and judge the candidates for president. I'm not going to allow some hater with a gun to deprive our country of our God-given right."
All the while, Martin was circling my bed at an excitable pace, occasionally pumping his fist in the air as he heard bits and pieces of memorable quotes shouted by Hutchins. I was off the phone one, maybe two seconds when he placed the laptop gently in my lap and told me to tap away. "We'll go with two stories: your interview with Hutchins, which will include some analysis on election impact, and then your own first-person account. No time for art right now. This stuff should write itself. Just hit the keys as fast as you can."
And I did. I did, that is, until that same middle-aged nurse from earlier in the day walked through the door, a woman who looked remarkably like my Aunt Helda, and you can guess what she's like. She shot a glance at me sitting up in bed, and you could follow the angry progression of her eyes, from the sheaf of notes I now had beside me to the laptop computer to Peter Martin, and I thought she might slug me, but figured I was safe even if she did, given this was a hospital.
"All right, out," she said to Martin as she came angrily around my bed to grab the computer.
He was cool as a cucumber, and what he had to say, he said in a very calm way. "You touch that laptop, you make even one more step in its direction, I start screaming at the top of my lungs that you've just killed my baby. I'll wake people up from here to Chevy Chase."
Seeing the look on his face, knowing what was at stake, I believed him.
Apparently, so did she. With nary a word, she backed up and stormed out of the room, I assumed, to get the security guards, though if she did, they never showed up. Martin, of course, closed the door to the room and locked it. Meanwhile, I typed. I wrote of Hutchins in his hospital bed, oozing bravado, accusing the militia of being haters. I wrote of his recollection of a flash and the sudden burst of pain. I wrote of his vow to return to the campaign trail by the weekend. Then I wrote my own account, beginning with the brilliant autumn morning, the pageant of colors, then quickly flipping to a blood-spattered sand trap and the Secret Service agents hurtling themselves into the line of fire.
When I was done, Martin took the computer and sat in one of those standard-issue hospital chairs, kind of low with an orange cushion back, and read, shaking his head all the while, rarely typing in any edits.
"Jesus Christ, I hate to tell you this, but you're good," he said finally.
"I know."
A visitor knocked, turned the knob, realized the door was locked, and then opened it with a key. He was a fifty-something man, fairly pleasant looking, actually, who said he was with the hospital's public relations department.
"Mr. Flynn, I have about fifty reporters downstairs in the cafeteria who are clamoring to see you," he said. "They asked me to invite you down for some questions."
Martin said, halfheartedly, as he plugged the computer into the phone jack and transmitted the two stories up to Boston, "Yeah, shit, I meant to tell you about that. You've become quite a little celebrity."
I was overcome by exhaustion and, conceited as I am, feared that in this condition I would look pale and bloated before the unforgiving eye of the television camera. "Can you take care of this tonight?" I asked Martin. "Tell them the doctor insisted I didn't come down, and tell them I'll be there in the morning to help as much as I can."
I was drained, mentally and physically. I'm a reporter, and tonight, that's what I did. It felt good. Still, something had changed. I had somehow turned into an unwitting celebrity, just for being there. My future was even in some doubt, though maybe a nice doubt, given this job offer I had received. Everything was so tiring, and I felt woozy.
Martin fiddled with the computer and made a call to the newsroom to make sure the stories had arrived safely. When he hung up, he turned to me in that pointed way of his and said, "Okay, so tell me. Why were you playing golf with the president of the United States?"
This was not an issue I felt like dealing with right then, but it was obvious, even in my semicomatose state, that I really had no choice.
Lying in bed, I looked straight ahead and said, "I'm doing that story on presidential pardons that you and I discussed, trying to figure out if there's any rhyme or reason to the pardons that the White House gave out last summer, and then a new one last month. It's unusual for them to pardon convicts in the middle of a campaign, and there are a couple of names I'm curious about, so I call the White House press office.
"They're helping me out a little bit, and the next thing I know, Royal Dalton calls and wants to know if I play golf. He says Hutchins is looking for a partner for Thursday morning during a quick campaign layover in D.c." and would I be available? If I play, he says, I might be able to lob him a question or two on the pardon issue."
Martin nodded, then asked the obvious question. "Did you?"
"Never got the chance," I replied. "I was waiting to do it after the round, and there was this small matter of getting shot."
I was so tired I could barely speak. Mid-conversation, I faded in and out of consciousness. I vaguely recall a doctor coming in, checking my pulse, fooling with the machines around my bed, talking softly with Martin. Two other visitors stepped into the room and showed the doctor badges. "FBI," I heard one of them say, the guy with the trench coat.
Looked like he was from central casting. The other was a younger woman with luxuriant black hair and a business suit. I could barely hold my eyes open, but as I did, I saw her smile at me, a nice smile that showed sweet dimples on a face that looked vaguely familiar. The doctor chatted with them a while, and then they left. Martin then left with the doctor, giving my forearm a quick pat on the way out.
Half-asleep, I remembered my earlier mysterious telephone call, a man's voice, a stern warning. Lies, everyone's telling lies. And I faded out again, this time to a place so blissful I would never find it again.