The Governor's Wife (21 page)

John Ed drank his bourbon.

"Hell, son, was me, I'd stick to being governor-for-life."

"I just think I could win, riding the wave."

"Wave? What wave?"

"The tea party."

John Ed snorted. "Pissin' in the wind. The money always wins in politics."

"I don't know, John Ed. The middle class is pretty fired up about the social issues—abortion, gay marriage, immigration."

"That's why they're stuck in the middle class."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, politics ain't about none of that social crap. It's about money. Rich people and poor people, we vote for the money. Poor folks vote for anyone promising to give them more money, rich folks for anyone promising to take less of our money. But the middle class, they take their Bibles into the voting booth—and that costs them money."

"How so?"

"Because while they're fretting over girls getting abortions and boys screwing boys, the politicians are stealing them blind. See, rich folks like me, we've got a lot of money individually, but not as a group. Hell, Obama could take every penny from every billionaire in America, and it wouldn't fund the government but for a few months, not when the Feds spend ten billion dollars every day. The big money's in the middle class. A hundred million folks working their butts off every day to put Junior and Sissy through college, that's where the income's at, that's the mother lode of taxes. Only way the government can spend four trillion a year is to tap the middle class. So the politicians keep the middle class occupied with that social crap—"

"While they steal their money."

"Exactly."

"Never occurred to me."

" 'Cause you're middle class. No offense."

Bode swallowed his bourbon. John Ed Johnson didn't pull his punches, and he wasn't a billionaire for nothing. Bode wouldn't turn his back on the old man, but he learned something every time they talked. It wasn't exactly a father-son relationship, but it was a relationship of sorts nonetheless.

"How 'bout another bourbon, Governor?"

The governor's wife sipped her wine. She and the doctor were sitting on the back porch of his house in rocking chairs. Pancho, the golden retriever, lay on the plank wood floor. Soft music drifted out through open windows. Mexico beyond the river seemed serene and peaceful at night. She had settled in to the guesthouse and cut her hair then showered and dressed in her new clothes for dinner. The doctor did cook. They ate grilled fish and drank wine. She had awakened that morning in the Governor's Mansion in Austin; she was now staring at the stars over the Rio Grande.

"This is my retreat from the reality of the
colonias
," the doctor said. He pointed up. "Look, see the eagle."

The bird glided on the currents back and forth between Mexico and America.

"Does the reality ever make you question your choice to work in the
colonias?
"

"Sometimes. But it is a useless question to ask. This is where I belong. My life will play out on this river."

They were silent for a time, just the sounds of the river and the night. Then the doctor spoke.

"Back before the Mexican War—what the Mexicans call the American Invasion—steamboats ran up and down the Rio Grande."

"It doesn't seem deep enough."

"It is not now. The river often runs dry before it reaches the Gulf of Mexico. But before the dams and the droughts, the river was deep and swift and wide. Ferries and steamboats ran the river. I often sit here and imagine what life on this river was like back then, when all of this land was Mexico, before the history of the border turned bloody. And wrongs beget wrongs."

He stared toward the river a long moment before he spoke again.

"History runs deep here on the border. Much deeper than the river."

That night in South Texas, the governor's wife went to bed happy. In West Texas, the governor went to bed with his mistress. Neither knew that their lives were about to change forever.

From two hundred fifty yards out, Bode Bonner sighted in a feral hog. A big one, at least three hundred pounds, feeding at dawn. One of three million roaming wild in the State of Texas. Nasty creatures, a nuisance to ranchers and farmers, rutting up pastures and crops. Consequently, the state authorized year-round hunting for feral hogs, even from helicopters. Feral entrepreneurs trapped and sold them to the Japanese, who considered wild boar meat a delicacy. Texans considered it coyote bait. Bode exhaled and squeezed the trigger. The hog dropped like a sack of potatoes when the .375-caliber bullet impacted its head.

"Good shot," Jim Bob said.

The Professor was smoking one of John Ed's Cuban cigars and spotting for Bode through high-powered binoculars. Ranger Hank stood behind them, as if on the lookout for a Comanche war party. Manuel held the horses.

"Easy shot, with the wind down and this rifle. Even with a hangover."

Bode had drunk too much bourbon with John Ed the night before. But Rosita's strong coffee and breakfast of
migas
and spicy
salsa
had slapped his mind clear. Not as clear as the blue sky, but sufficient to hunt. He leaned the rifle against a rock and drank more coffee from the thermos Rosita had filled. April mornings a mile up in the Davis Mountains still got down to freezing, so Bode wore a hunting jacket over a denim shirt and a western-style leather holster packing his matched set of Colt Walker .44-caliber six-shooters just like Captain Augustus McCrae carried in
Lonesome Dove
. He couldn't strap on the six-shooters in the city, so he couldn't pass up the opportunity in the country. He loved being out of the city and in the country and on the back of a horse, only the smell of gunpowder and cigar smoke in his nostrils. They had gotten up at five, eaten breakfast, and met Manuel out back with the horses saddled and their guns loaded. Mandy was sleeping in.

John Ed Johnson wore only a bathrobe when he quietly opened the door to the guest bedroom. Across the spacious room he saw a mass of blonde hair emerging from the comforter on the king-sized bed. He walked over and dropped his bathrobe then lifted the comforter and climbed aboard. He sidled close to the naked backside of the governor's aide. She stirred.

"Bode?"

"Guess again, honey."

She jumped back against the headboard and clutched the comforter to her body.

"Mr. Johnson!"

"John Ed."

"Mr. Johnson—what are you doing?"

"I thought we might play while the governor's away."

"I'm not a plaything, Mr. Johnson!"

"Aw, I doubt Bode would mind."

"I mind. I love Bode, and he loves me. I would never cheat on him."

"Not even for a million dollars?"

"Not even for a million dollars!"

Odd. That usually worked.

"Well, hell, guess I'll go climb into Rosita's bed."

John Ed slid out of bed and put on his bathrobe.

"The governor's in a helluva lot more trouble than he knows, having a woman who's not his wife in love with him."

Lindsay Bonner opened her eyes onto a different world. She was waking up alone again, but not on the day bed in the sitting room in the Governor's Mansion in downtown Austin. She lay in a soft bed in a small guesthouse situated among a stand of palm trees only a few hundred feet from the Rio Grande and Mexico beyond.

Had she really done this?

She was a forty-four-year-old woman. She was the mother of an eighteen-year-old college student. She was a married woman and had been for the last twenty-two years. She was the governor's wife.

Whose husband was probably fit to be tied right about now.

But she had done it. She had escaped the crowds and cameras, the press and politics, the Governor's Mansion and the governor's wife. All of that was her husband's adventure. She had embarked on her own adventure. Her own life. A life that would have meaning.

Lindsay Bonner would make a difference.

She jumped out of bed and showered in the small bathroom. Then she dressed in her new clothes: the yellow peasant dress, green scarf, wide-brimmed hat, and pink Crocs. But no make-up. She looked at herself in the mirror. She barely recognized the woman looking back at her.

Here on the border, she was not the governor's wife.

Jesse Rincón ran the river, as he and Pancho did each morning. But that morning was unlike any before.

The governor's wife lay asleep in his guesthouse.

Five years now, he had resigned himself to a life without fame or fortune or love. He had never sought fame or fortune. Love was a different matter. He had often hoped for love. And now love was upon him. But for how long? How long would she sleep in his guesthouse? How long would she work with him in the
colonias?
How long before she left him? These questions threatened to darken his mind, but he refused them entry.

He stopped short.

Jesse Rincón vowed at that moment, standing in Texas and staring at Mexico as the sun rose over the Rio Grande, that he would not look beyond each day. He would live each day he had with her as if it would be his last, because one day it would be.

Bode slid the rifle into the leather scabbard secured to his saddle. They mounted their horses and rode off. They would leave the hog for the vultures that were already circling overhead. Hank and Manuel took the lead twenty yards ahead. Manuel Moreno was a short, wiry man, perhaps forty but possibly fifty. He carried a two-way radio linked to the lodge. Jim Bob carried a satellite phone. Bode Bonner was the governor of Texas, and he sure as hell didn't want to be lost and stranded on this ranch, twenty-five square miles of the most beautiful and brutal land in Texas.

"John Ed ambushed me with that eminent domain bill last night, said he talked to you about it."

"Yep."

"You knew he was gonna ask me for help getting it through the legislature?"

"Yep."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Would you have told John Ed no and forgone the twenty million if I had?"

"No."

"That's why I didn't tell you."

"He's giving us twenty-five."

"That'll put us over forty-five million. Good work."

"Still, Jim Bob—next time, tell me."

They rode on in silence. The air was cold, and the wind was down. The sky was big and blue, the mountains brown and low. Hawks and peregrine falcons soared on the currents above, and cool spring water bubbled out of the earth below. Named in honor of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, the Davis Mountains were part of the Chihuahuan Desert that extended up from Mexico. The lower elevations were in fact desert, hot and dry and dotted with prickly pear and cholla cactus and creosote bush and giant yuccas and enough agave plants to supply several tequila factories. But the climb into the higher elevations brought blue grama grass and clear spring creeks and forests of Ponderosa and
Piñon
pine and even silver aspen. They called this land a "sky island." Bode had made the journey to these mountains many summers; while the rest of Texas suffered the hundred-degree heat, the mountains offered a cool oasis. The clean air soon eased his irritation at his political strategist. He could never stay mad at Jim Bob Burnet. They had been inseparable since fifth grade. Bode had rescued Jim Bob from bullies, and Jim Bob had saved Bode from math and science. They needed each other back then, and they still did today.

"I asked John Ed if he'd support me if I made a run for the White House."

"And?"

"Said he couldn't afford it."

"He didn't lie. Supreme Court threw out the campaign finance law, so the next presidential campaign's going to cost each party a billion dollars, and that's real money, even for John Ed."

Jim Bob inhaled on his cigar and seemed to ponder the mountain sky. When he spoke, he was the Professor.

"A presidential run, Bode, it's brutal. Physically and mentally. Campaigning every day for two years, studying policy like you're cramming for a world history final so you don't come off an idiot in the debates, getting demonized by the left-wing media searching for every woman you ever dated to see if they'll claim sexual harassment … They're pit bulls with press passes. Why subject yourself to that?"

"It'd be a hell of an adventure."

"Could be a hell of a disaster."

"The thrill of victory or the agony of defeat … That's why we play the game."

The Professor puffed on his cigar.

"You're a full-blown type-T personality, you know that? T for thrills."

"Never denied it."

"We did a research study at the school, why men go into politics."

"So why do we?"

"Power, fame, money, thrills … and younger women, of course."

"Politics offers a man the complete package without the need for post-season knee surgery."

"If you win."

"One big play, Jim Bob."

The Professor exhaled cigar smoke.