The Governor's Wife (15 page)

Perhaps a woman like the governor's wife.

He stepped to the full-length mirror on the wall and examined himself. He was well-mannered and well-groomed, educated and sophisticated, still lean and fit from his
béisbol
days, but … gray streaks now marred his jet-black hair and goatee and made him look old. As old as he often felt. Older than his years. When he watched American baseball on the cable channels, always the advertisements were for the erectile dysfunction drugs and hair color for men. Enrique had no need for Viagra, not yet, but … He ran his fingers through his hair and stroked his goatee just as the door opened and Hector appeared.

"
¡Jefe!
"

Enrique raised an open hand.

"Hector, do you think I should use that 'Just for Men'?"

"Just for what?"

"The hair color. To wash away the gray."

"Oh."

Hector was bald.

"Uh, I do not know,
jefe
."

"Do you think she would find me more attractive?"

"Who?"

Enrique gestured at the television screen.

"The governor's wife."

"Oh, yes. Definitely."

"You are not just saying that?"

"No, no."

"Hector, I need a woman—"

"I will go get you one."

"No, not that kind of woman. A wife. A mother for Carmelita."

It was very difficult these days to be a single parent with all the bad influences on children—the Internet, cable TV, violent video games, iPhones—he had caught Carmelita texting a boy at her school the other night. She was only ten! He wished their mother were still alive. She knew how to raise children. And how to be firm. Sweet Carmelita, she knew how to wrap her father around her little finger.

"Make a note for Hilda. Next time she comes to cut my hair, have her bring that hair color."

"
Sí
."

"Now what is it that you need, Hector?"

"
¡Jefe! ¡Esto es urgente!
Your son needs you!"

Enrique de la Garza—known to the rest of the world as El Diablo—turned from the mirror and took one last long look at the woman's image on the television screen.

"She is a very beautiful woman, no? I should like very much to meet her one day, the governor's wife."

The governor's wife stifled a yawn.

The heat and her county fair lunch of fried chicken, fried okra, fried ice cream, fried Twinkies, fried butter—every four years the governor's wife had to prove to the voters that she was still a country girl who ate country food—had conspired to make her drowsy. But she fought her heavy eyelids. It would not do her husband's campaign any good for the cameras to catch her yawning during his speech. Standing at the podium a few feet away, Governor Bode Bonner bellowed sound bites in his booming campaign voice.

"We got boys marrying boys and girls marrying girls and kids having kids and Mexicans having Americans and …"

Of course, it was difficult not to yawn when she had heard the same speech a hundred times, maybe more. She knew every crowd-pleasing phrase, every pause for effect, every applause line … and she hated every word of it.

She wanted to scream.

She always put her mind somewhere else during his speeches, tried not to listen to her husband's words and hoped he didn't believe them, that he was just an actor on a stage reciting his lines. But was he? Had he come to believe his own speeches? She feared he had. That he had bought into his own ambition.

He wanted to be president.

A faint hint of smoke from the wildfires out west and a stronger scent of farm animals filled the stock show arena at the Lubbock County Fairgrounds where that very morning the governor's wife had presented the prize for the Grand Champion Bull. The governor now stood before ten thousand registered Republicans gazing up at him like a flock of sheep, waving little American flags, and eating up his red-meat stump speech, the one in which he railed against the federal government, Washington, deficits, taxes, global warming, gay marriage, ObamaCare, liberals, and illegal Mexican immigrants.

"What part of
illegal
don't they understand? They don't need a path to citizenship—they need a path to the border!"

Amarillo on Tuesday, Midland on Wednesday, and Lubbock on Thursday. A campaign swing through the rural counties of West Texas—the Bible Belt of Texas. The brightest red counties in a bright red state. Tea party country. Bode Bonner country. Cattle ranches, cotton farms, and oil wells. Where the people loved their governor and hated their government—except the government that gave them farm and ranch subsidies and tax breaks for oil. They liked that part of government. But her husband was a politician, so he told them what they wanted to hear.

"They want to pick your doctor and indoctrinate your kids … They took Christ out of Christmas and prayers out of school …"

And she now wondered, as she often wondered when out on the campaign trail: How did she get from a cattle ranch in Comfort to a stump speech in Lubbock?

The first day of April had Lindsay Bonner longing for home. Not the Governor's Mansion—that had never been home to her—but their ranch in the Hill Country north of San Antonio. Her family had moved to Texas when she was five and Comfort when she was fifteen. At twenty-two, she had married Bode Bonner and moved to his family's five-thousand-acre ranch. That had been her home until eight years ago when they moved into the Mansion. She missed the ranch. She missed the small hacienda-style house with the courtyard and the flowers and the shade trees. She missed spring when the days were warm and the nights cool, when the green returned to the pastures, and the bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush covered the hills like a blanket of blue and red and yellow. She missed riding with Ramón and cooking with Chelo. She missed spring roundup with the
vaqueros
. Lindsay Bonner much preferred working cattle than working crowds. She was a reluctant politician's wife.

Her husband was not a reluctant politician.

"When it's hot and dry, they say it's global warming. When it's cold and wet, they say it's global warming. Hell, in Texas we call it summer and winter."

The crowd cheered. They loved him. And Bode Bonner loved them. He craved attention, whether from football fans or registered Republicans. She did not. He had always been the star; she had always lived in his sizable shadow from that day in ninth grade when Bode Bonner, senior football star, had walked up to her in the hallway and asked her to the homecoming dance. The moment she said yes, she had taken up residence in his shadow. And there she had lived the past twenty-nine years. But now she needed more. Not more attention. Not more from a man. But more from life.

Her own life.

Politics had destroyed their lives. Her life, anyway. Bode had gone on to the University of Texas and majored in football. By the time she arrived at UT in his senior year, his shadow consumed the entire campus. When the NFL passed on Bode Bonner due to the four knee operations, he returned to the family ranch. After she graduated with a nursing degree, she had become Mrs. Bode Bonner. He ranched cattle; she worked in the emergency room at a San Antonio trauma hospital. She was happy then; she had her own life and the life they shared. Then Becca came into their lives, and they were happier. She would never forget Bode lifting the little girl up onto his horse, sitting her in the saddle in front of him, and the two of them galloping off. It was a glorious moment. Becca Bonner was Bode Bonner's daughter, as beautiful as he was handsome, tall and athletic, at home riding horses and roping cattle.

Bode Bonner loved his daughter more than life itself.

Lindsay Bonner loved those years. She was content. Happy. Useful. But Bode needed more. More excitement, more adventure, more competition. He needed politics. Men needed three basic things in life: sex, food, and competition. Politics provided two out of three. So he ran for the state legislature to champion rural interests as Texas became more urban. He lost his first election as a Democrat, but he won his second election as a Republican and every election since. But it wasn't enough. It was never enough.

He always yearned for higher office.

"Texas was once an independent nation—and if Washington keeps messin' with Texas, we just might be again!"

She suddenly snapped out of her thoughts—the Lubbock Republicans sitting on either side of her were applauding the governor and glancing suspiciously at his wife. She was late with her applause. Again. She now clapped for her husband. He basked in the applause.

Bode Bonner had fallen in love with politics. It filled a need inside him. It fed his competitive instincts and enabled his ambition. It stole the romance from their lives. He had found something he loved more than her. It was painful enough for a woman to lose her man to another woman, always a risk when her man is in politics, but to lose her man
to
politics, that bordered on cruel. But seduced by politics he was. So he ran for the governorship. Texas had turned red and Republican, but Bode saw that it had also turned green, as in money from big business, that the State Capitol was no longer the seat of government, but instead a shopping mall where laws, rules, and regulations were bought and sold—and the people were sold out. But Bode Bonner had been different. He was a populist. A man of the people. He wanted to change things.

Now he wanted to get reelected.

She had campaigned with him that first election, crisscrossing the State of Texas in a pickup truck. It was romantic, it was fun, and it was important: Bode Bonner was going to make a difference. He promised change, and the voters put him in the Governor's Mansion. Election night was glorious, standing next to her husband, the governor of Texas.

But once elected, they descended upon him. People vested in state government: people doing business with the state, seeking money from the state, buying from the state, selling to the state, lobbying the state, controlling the state. People vested in the status quo. People who didn't want their world to change. The power brokers and lobbyists and lawyers entered their lives, and they changed Bode Bonner. He became what he had hated. He sold his soul for four more years in the Governor's Mansion. And she had aided and abetted him, the dutiful and loyal governor's wife.

And she was still living in his shadow.

He now grabbed the microphone and stalked the stage, no notes, no teleprompter, just Bode Bonner and a microphone, quoting chapter and verse of tea party politics.

"Washington is giving America away to Wall Street, to multinational corporations that outsource your jobs and in-source their profits …"

He could've been a preacher. The "Bode Bonner Hour" on Sunday morning television. So tall, so handsome, so articulate—an ex-football player, imagine that—but he wasn't real. He was just an image in a campaign commercial in his cowboy boots and hair sprayed in place. He was a cut-out cardboard figure you stood next to to have your photograph taken. That was not the man she had married. That was the politician Jim Bob Burnet had created.

She blamed Peggy.

Jim Bob had met and married Peggy at UT; Lindsay had been her maid of honor and Bode his best man. But Jim Bob had changed when Peggy left him five years later and ran off to California with their daughter, when she had decided that Jim Bob Burnet would never give her the life she wanted. Peggy was like that. Politics—winning elections—became Jim Bob Burnet's life. His obsession. As if he needed to prove to himself and to Peggy that she was wrong about him. But he couldn't do it alone. He needed Bode Bonner. So he took her husband and changed him.

Jim Bob made her husband a politician.

"But your voice isn't heard in Washington because you live in a red state and vote Republican, because you read the Bible and not the
New York Times
…"

Bode pulled out the pocket-sized Constitution he always carried and waved it in the air like Moses waving the Ten Commandments, a signal that he was building to the big finale, whipping the crowd into an anti-government, tea-party frenzy.

"Because you believe in Jefferson and Madison, not Marx and Lenin, free enterprise not freeloading, America not ObamaCare …"

He could fire up a crowd. He always said it was no different than firing up the football team before a game. This crowd was ready to play for Bode Bonner. To vote for Bode Bonner.

"This is our America! This is God's country! God bless Lubbock! God bless Texas! God bless America! And never ever forget: Bode Bonner's got your back!"

The crowd broke into wild applause and that familiar chant—"Bo-de! Bo-de! Bo-de!"—just as the crowd had chanted back when he had starred on the Longhorn team. Back then, she had joined in the chant from the spectator seats. But not today. For two terms, she had accepted her role as the dutiful loyal spouse. She had played her role, perfected her role.

But that had all changed now.

Her trip to the border had changed her. A month had passed, a month of public appearances and photo ops and volunteer work—but something was missing now. Or now she noticed what had been missing for so long. That day in the
colonias
had made acting a role unacceptable, living in someone's shadow intolerable, cheering from the sideline unbearable. She wanted to live her own life again. She wanted to be useful again.