The Governor's Wife (4 page)

Jim Bob was always a little jumpy, as if worried someone might sneak up behind him and put him in a headlock like the cowboys in Comfort used to do to him in the middle-school restroom, until Bode took him under his wing. From that day, Jim Bob Burnet had pledged his undying loyalty to Bode Bonner. Another knock, and the door swung open on Jim Bob's new young assistant. He waved her in. She walked over and handed a stack of papers to Jim Bob. But she smiled at Bode.

"Mornin', Governor," she said in a syrupy Southern drawl.

Her perfume drifted over and incited Bode's male hormones the same as waving a red flag at a bull. Bode's eyes involuntarily dropped from her face to her body and then slowly worked their way down to her feet and back up to her face. When their eyes again met, she winked. Damn, she was a frisky gal—whose name he couldn't recall.

"Morning, uh …"

"Jolene … Jo."

"Jolene. Sounds like a country song."

She gave him a coy smile.

" 'Cause I'm a country girl."

"Are you now?"

Bode caught Jim Bob rolling his eyes.

"That'll be all, Jo," he said.

Jolene sashayed out in her tight pants and high heels. Jim Bob shook his head.

"You're a goddamn rooster in a hen house."

He put the stack of papers on the desk then slid the top document across to Bode. He sat behind the desk and grabbed his signing pen.

"What's this?"

"You're appointing Joe Jack Munger to the UT Board of Regents."

"Munger?"

"Oilman out in Midland, went to UT."

"He know anything about education?"

"He knows how to write a big check to your reelection campaign. Two hundred grand."

Bode signed the appointment, one of the few powers of the office. The University of Texas had always been run by the governor's cronies and contributors, more like a real-estate venture than a university. Jim Bob pushed another document across the desk.

"Proclamation."

"Proclaiming what?"

"A day of prayer for rain."

"Damn drought. How are we doing on those wildfires out west?"

"Out of control."

"Half of Texas is burning, and Obama won't declare those counties disaster areas so those folks can get federal funds to rebuild. Blue state fucking hiccups, he sends in billions. Red state, he lets us die in a drought."

"It's called politics."

He signed the proclamation.

"Next document."

Bode read the title: "Deed?"

"The land deal. With Hoot Pickens."

"You run this by the lawyers?"

Jim Bob nodded. "It's legal. And profitable. Half a million bucks. We put it in your blind trust, gives us deniability."

Bode signed the deed. Jim Bob gathered the papers then checked his watch and stood.

"Come on, we're late."

"For what?"

"Elementary school."

Bode groaned. "Aw, damn, Jim Bob—not reading to kindergartners again? I hate that shit."

Jim Bob offered a lame shrug.

"You made education a major part of your platform—faith, family, and schools."

"Just because Lindsay wanted something to do. Why can't she read to them?"

"She was supposed to, but I had to send her down to the border—Delgado's in from Washington. They're trying to get the Mexicans in the
colonias
counted for the census."

"Why?"

"So Texas can get more seats in Congress. We've got thirty-two seats now. If we can get all those Mexicans counted, we can pick up three or four more seats. And once I'm through redistricting the state, every one of those seats will be Republican."

"No—why'd you send Lindsay down to the border? Why couldn't I go?"

"Because you don't speak Spanish. She does."

"
No teman el censo.
"

"Yes, Mrs. Bonner," Congressman Delgado said. " 'Do not fear the census.' That is our message this day."

Two hundred thirty-five miles south of the Governor's Mansion and two blocks north of the Rio Grande, the governor's wife stared out the tinted window of the black Suburban as their five-car caravan rolled around the San Agustín Plaza in downtown Laredo. She had flown in the night before and stayed at the La Posada Hotel on the plaza. She would fly back to Austin that afternoon. Up front, a state trooper drove, and her Texas Ranger bodyguard rode shotgun. She sat in the back seat with the congressman. His aftershave reminded Lindsay of her father when she was a little girl riding in his lap and pretending to steer the old Buick. Congressman Delgado pointed out the window at a white church with a tall clock tower.

"The San Agustín Cathedral," he said. "I was baptized there. And that is the old convent for the Ursuline Sisters, but the nuns are gone. And the Plaza Theatre, it is shuttered now, but I watched many cowboy movies there as a child. That was, of course, many years ago." He chuckled. "I was born in Laredo, but I am afraid I will die in Washington."

Ernesto Delgado had first been elected to Congress in 1966. He was seventy-eight now and had no thought of retiring.

"The plaza seems …"

"Dead?"

She nodded.

"Yes, it is March and our streets should be crowded with college students on spring break, staying in hotels on this side of the river and partying on the other side. Gin fizzes at the Cadillac Bar and pretty girls in Boys' Town—Nuevo Laredo once boasted the cheapest drinks and the best prostitutes on the border. It is legal in Mexico, prostitution."

A wistful expression crossed the congressman's creased face, as if he had experienced all that Nuevo Laredo had to offer in his younger days.

"Now the Cadillac Bar is closed, and Nuevo Laredo has only the drugs and violence to offer, so the DPS issues travel warnings. 'Avoid traveling to Mexico during spring break, and stay alive,' the one this year said. So the students, they go to Padre Island instead. And the streets of Laredo are empty."

The streets were empty. The few pedestrians on the plaza walked slowly, as if they had no place to go. Palm trees and old Spanish-style structures lined the brick-paved plaza, a few elderly tourists snapped photos, and some of the businesses still seemed alive—Casa de Empeño, Casa Raul, Pepe's Sporting Goods, Fantasía Linda—albeit protected by burglar bars. Other storefronts sat boarded-up, left to decay in the dry air. Faded murals, a fenced-off movie theatre, a forgotten convent—the streets of Laredo were paved but not with gold. The town seemed tired and weary, like an old person who recalled an earlier time, when her life had meaning. When she was useful. Lindsay Bonner was only forty-four, but she often felt like that old person. Or this old town. Old. Useless. Unnecessary. She still had the energy, the drive, and the desire to be useful and necessary, but she had no place. No purpose. Her husband was the governor and her daughter a college student; her jobs as mother and wife were finished now. She was the governor's wife, but that was not the same as being a wife. It was a role she played; it was not her. So she volunteered around Austin, but she was always the governor's wife. She could not escape that identity. That prison. Those cameras. That was her role now, a pretty face that brought out the cameras.

A photo op.

Local television and newspaper reporters and cameramen ready to record every moment of her visit to the border followed in vans with their stations' logos stenciled in bright colors on the sides. A Department of Public Safety cruiser manned by two well-armed state troopers led the way; a local police car with two well-armed cops brought up the rear. Security for the governor's wife and a U.S. congressman. Their DPS driver cocked his head their way.

"You know what they call an American in Nuevo Laredo?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Victim."

He laughed. He was Anglo. The congressman responded with a pained expression.

"Border humor. The cartels, they killed over one hundred Americans last year and kidnapped many more who have never been seen again. But the Nuevo Laredo mayor, he says we have only a public relations problem, that with better press, the tourists will return to the border. Of course, Nuevo Laredo is under martial law and the mayor, he sleeps on this side of the river. I think that is what they call, denial."

The caravan coursed through the maze of narrow one-way streets that was downtown Laredo and then past the bridge leading into Mexico. They turned north and accelerated onto Interstate 35. They drove through the city landscape at seventy miles per hour, only the palm trees distinguishing the journey from that through any other city in Texas, and the governor's wife had journeyed through most the last eight years. They exited the interstate and turned west on Mines Road. They soon reached the outskirts of Laredo, and beyond that, the city became the desert. The land lay vast and empty and flat, brown and parched from the drought, only scrub brush and dirt as far as the eye could see.

Lindsay Bonner had been born in Boston but had grown up in the Hill Country of Texas, a land of streams and rivers and lakes, so contrary to this land. She had been to the border the tourists see, but never to the borderlands. Her husband did not campaign here. He said it was simply a matter of getting the most bang for your campaign buck. There was little bang for a Republican on the border: the people who inhabited this harsh land were Democrats, poor Latinos who did not contribute to political campaigns and who did not vote. So to the politicians in Austin, they did not exist. Perhaps that was why she had jumped at the chance to come south.

She often felt as if she did not exist. And she was a Democrat.

She had never told her husband, of course, and she had never officially registered, but she had always voted straight-ticket Democrat—except she had always voted for her husband. The bonds of matrimony. Or the guilt of a Catholic: to love, honor, and obey, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse. Father O'Rourke had said nothing about a husband converting to Republican. It was worse. She was smiling at the thought of what her husband would say if he ever learned her secret—there would be profanity—when they abruptly veered off the highway and turned south onto a bumpy dirt road that cut through dense brush—

"Chaparral," the congressman said.

—and bounced her about. The DPS cruiser in front kicked up a cloud of dust that enveloped their Suburban. But visible in the distance through the dust was a low shadow that seemed to rise from the desert and extended east and west as far as she could see until it disappeared into the haze. The shadow grew taller and taller as they came closer until it loomed large overhead. But it wasn't a shadow.

"What is that?"

"That, Mrs. Bonner, is the border fence."

"But it's not a fence. It's a wall."

"Yes. Some portions along the border are fences, but here it is a wall. Eighteen feet high, constructed of steel with six feet of reinforced concrete below ground—apparently the Department of Homeland Security thinks the Mexicans will be arriving in Abrams tanks."

"This is what Bush wanted in America? Our own Berlin Wall?"

"Obama voted for the border wall, too, Mrs. Bonner, when he was in the Senate. He was a politician before he became the president."

They stopped in front of a massive gate guarded by two Border Patrol agents wearing green uniforms and wielding military-style rifles as if guarding the gates to a kingdom. Or a prison. Were they keeping them out or someone else in? Her Texas Ranger bodyguard threw open his door. Dirt blew in with the hot wind; Lindsay averted her face until the Ranger stepped out of the vehicle and slammed the door shut as if he were angry at the Suburban. He pushed his cowboy hat down hard on his head to prevent the wind from taking it north to San Antonio and marched over to the Border Patrol agents. After a brief discussion, the agents opened the gate, reluctantly it seemed. The Ranger returned, removed his hat, and got back in the vehicle, grumbling something about "Feds." They drove through the gates, and Lindsay sat up, anticipating what she would see on the other side, which was—

Nothing.

She saw nothing but more chaparral and dirt. She had expected something, perhaps a panoramic view of the majestic Rio Grande. But the river was nowhere in sight. The wall just cut through the land like a random mountain range.

"So the border wall isn't actually on the border?"

"Oh, no," the congressman said. "The border runs right down the middle of the Rio Grande, so the wall, it is off the border. Here, about a mile. Elsewhere, maybe two miles." He chuckled. "Over in Eagle Pass, the public golf course runs right along the river. The golfers, they would be hitting their balls and suddenly Mexicans would dart out of the
carrizos
, the thick reeds by the river, and race across the fairways and into town where they could mix in with the locals. So Homeland Security built the fence on the town side of the golf course, to block the Mexicans' path. But they also blocked the golfers' escape. So now the Mexicans jump out of the
carrizos
with guns and rob the golfers."

He now gave out a hearty laugh.

"You cannot make that up," he said.