The campaign bus of former Senator Hoss Deluge (R-PA) was cramped between a dumpster and an old bathtub in the sandy lot behind Harper Bay’s American Economy Hotel. Hoss parked the thing himself. He insisted always on being “hands-on.” And there was also this: the teamster he'd hired had run off when the campaign ran out of money.
The Senator’s wife, Dorothy Deluge, stood over the bathtub, which was full of flowers. A garden of violets, dandelions, gypsophila, and other puny petaled sprouts had been planted there accidentally by birds and squirrels with their stool. Before that the tub was a cauldron in which crystal meth was brewed.
With a relaxed arch that confessed his history as an outfielder for Penn State, Hoss chucked his smartphone far into the rows of corn that fenced in the lot. The vicious little machine had been shaking and howling incessantly for the last twelve hours, since the pictures had been released of the Senator shaking hands with a band of Science Olympians, one of whom thereafter radicalized, left an eighty-nine page manifesto on his kitchen table, and shot up a mall in Cincinnati, Ohio with an AR-15.
Ohio: a swing state.
Ohio: THE swing state.
This was after the campaign was already in trouble. After Hoss had fumbled with the answer to one of only four questions directed towards him at the first Republican primary debate. (“We oughta remember that these criminals are still people,” he’d flubbed. A round of coughs skipped through the audience.) After Pennsylvania dynamite tycoon Moses Callahan revoked his support. (“Hoss, sometimes you need to know when to flush a turd.”) After his staffers decided unanimously that they would not be working on a volunteer basis. (They’d already been sick of his hammy middle schooler bravado, which was much more endearing when doled out in thirteen second installments on cable news shows)
Now this Olympiad punk. Introvert California-born techy gone over to the dark side. Pundits using the Senator’s name as a spat word. (“The question is: when put to the test, will the other GOP candidates Hoss Out?”)
Finally, Hoss was getting some real air time.
Dorothy hummed something Simon & Garfunkel-y while ripping flowers from the bathtub. Very shortly, the cytoplasm bleeding from the stems would sink into the skin of her fingers and give her a mild high.
“Look at these,” she said to her husband.
Hoss spat.
“Let’s just get inside. I need some Zs and Rs.”
Outside their window, a loose shingle slapped against the roof like a stomping gestapo boot. Hoss flicked through the channels then unplugged the TV and rotated it so the screen faced the wall as if it had been bad.
“Lie down with me,” he told his wife.
Dorothy obliged him. They took off their clothes and slept for a half hour, lying together like mismatched dinnerware, and then they were jolted awake-- Dorothy by the amphetamines in her bloodstream, Hoss by a dream wherein his teeth hatched and a cloud of gnats flew out and consumed his head.
“Gimme a break,” Hoss huffed. He wasn't addressing anyone in particular.
“Hehehehehehehehehehe,” Dorothy said, her pupils whole olives.
“What are you tittering for?”
“Oh, who knows, who knows, who knows.”
“I'm going for a walk. Stretch my legs.”
“Stretch Armstrong,” Dorothy blurted.
“Yeah,” said Hoss.
Walking with his gaze at his feet, Hoss Deluge had the sense that the pattern on the carpet might climb up around his ankles and yank him underneath the floor. The pattern was a swarm of sinister octagons. The octagons hated Hoss.
Hotels tried to reproduce domestic comforts, but they always got the carpet wrong, and that made Hoss feel blue.
He stopped at the vending nook, coveted a puck of chocolate covered nougat from his childhood, dug in his khakis for his billfold.
He scarfed the candy alone in the hallway. Not as good as he remembered. He folded the wrapper into a dense rectangle and set it down inside one of the smaller, angrier octagons.
“Well, that was that,” he said. Regret burned somewhere in his small intestine.
When he returned to his room, a woman across the hall was struggling to slide her keycard across her lock with three grocery bags hanging from each forearm and a leather purse over her shoulder. The woman had her hair in a messy bun, and Hoss could see on the back of her neck a tattoo of a prickly red centipede meandering up her vertebrae.
“Son of a bitch,” she said. One of the grocery bags had been spontaneously disemboweled, and she tried to catch its contents with her legs. Her thighs squeezed a jar of spaghetti sauce. The other jars and packets and cans made acquaintance with the octagons.
“Let me help you,” Hoss said. He went over to her and took a knee to pick up the food.
“Thanks.”
“Ayuh.”
She met him on the floor and looked at him intently. Hoss saw her trying to place him.
“You've got some schmutz on your face,” she told him.
“Oh,” Hoss said. He scrubbed at his mouth with a knuckle. His hand went away stained with chocolate.
With the stray items rebagged, they stood up, and the woman smiled and adjusted her grip.
“I've got it from here,” she said. Hoss interpreted: he didn't want him standing beside her when she opened the door.
“You got it,” he said. He went back across the hall.
“You know somebody died in that room?” The woman called after him.
Hoss halted. “That right? Mine?”
“I guess so. Some divorced guy. Shot himself.”
“Tragedy,” Hoss said.
“I think so. I think it’s awfully sad. Too many people killed with guns lately. But we better change subjects. The road to hell is paved with politics.”
“Can't argue with that,” Hoss said.
“I don’t think it makes much difference, anyway, what I believe, so I'd rather stay a naive idealist. If it doesn't matter anyway, I might as well align myself with kindness and compassion.”
As she spoke, the woman got her card to cooperate. The lock flashed green and clicked. A TV was on in her room.
“Hehehehehehehehehehe,” said a foolish cartoon rabbit.
The woman nodded goodbye, stepped inside. Her centipede writhed.
And Hoss Deluge shook his head. “Wishful thinking,” he thought. He prayed to God for an end to wishful thinking.
That night, Dorothy cried and she wouldn’t say why and she fidgeted and preened herself anxiously with gerbil-like pawing and combing and stroking. She sat on the radiator below the window and touched her palms to the glass and cried and the gestapo boot outside stomped and stomped. A waning quarter moon drenched the lot outside in blue light. The portrait of Senator Hoss Deluge painted on the side of the bus grinned up at them: murky, grotesque, half-smothered in shadow.
The next morning they drove through Detroit on their way into Canada. Hoss noticed that there was no consistent layout of prosperity. Four star tourist hovels stood beside dirty unlit storefronts guarded by bums. A prismatic conference center shared a corner with a rotting brick factory building checkered with windows like gouged out eyes. Hoss had never seen a city where success rubbed elbows so frankly with destitution.
“Look at that,” Dorothy told him. She pointed past the traffic jam leading up to the Ambassador Bridge to a slanted sidewalk bordering a plot of yellowed crabgrass where an eight year old boy was pulling along a vintage television set on a skateboard. The boy held the power cord like a leash. He looked content.