America America by Ethan Canin

school,” he said. “Dunleavy Academy. You’ll know that soon enough. It’s a very fine and exclusive school. I went there myself. And so did Andrew—for his first couple of years, anyway. If you impress this fellow next week,” he said, “you’ll have a chance to go, too.”
    “I will?” I bent to the grass and wiped my hands again. Aberdeen Red had distracted me. At first I thought he had said
task
. I’ve arranged a
task
for you.
    “And don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll give you a few pointers before you meet with him. Just so you know what to expect.” He tossed another stone. “You certainly deserve it,” he added, “as much as anyone.”
    IV
    O N A RAVISHING SUMMER AFTERNOON in the second half of that month, with three TV cameras, a dozen radio microphones, and two rows of print reporters in front of him, and his wife and two teenaged sons next to him, Henry Bonwiller, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and senior member of the Armed Services Committee, announced to the country that he would seek the Democratic nomination for president.
    Now, of course, the Senator is known for what happened later; but this was early on, well before Anodyne Energy or anything else, and I can only say that in the days that followed he seemed to light the air he walked through. When he arrived in the morning, I could see the staff standing at the windows to catch glimpses of him. When he walked in town in the afternoon, stopping for kids to pet Uncle Dan, a policeman had to keep the traffic moving.
    His ring of influence immediately grew wider. Early in the summer, President Nixon announced that he was going to allow trade with Communist China, and not even a full day later, there was Senator Bonwiller speaking about it to CBS Evening News outside the Metarey work barn, where he and Eric Sevareid stood next to a new John Deere combine. And there they both were again that very evening, on my parents’ television set, while Mr. McGowar and my father watched from the living room couch and my mother looked in from the kitchen, a dishrag and a wet pot in her hands.
    “China—” Mr. McGowar coughed. In his hands was an apple-sized hunk of quartz that he was cleaning with his handkerchief. “That’s—” He took a long breath. “That’s—” He coughed again. “—Trouble.”
    “Nah,” said my father. “For the unions it’s great. Think of all those millions of Chinese.” He took a drink from his Pabst Blue Ribbon. “Buying our stuff. They’ll buy Deere and New Holland by the thousands.” He took another drink. “They don’t have that kind of thing over there, Eugene.” Then he whistled the opening of “Cockles and Mussels.”
    Mr. McGowar looked pained but didn’t answer. He just waved one hand at the TV and with the other went on polishing.
    “Hmm,” said my mother from the kitchen doorway, “you know, Senator Bonwiller’s a handsome man on camera. Did I see you for just a sec in the background, Cor?”
    “No, Mom. You didn’t.”
    At the end of June, the Supreme Court ruled that
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
could publish the Pentagon Papers, and President Nixon called for the arrest of Daniel Ellsberg, who immediately went into hiding. That Monday, Henry Bonwiller stood up on the Senate floor and called Ellsberg a national hero. He read page after page of the Pentagon Papers into the
Congressional Record
, recording for posterity that the government had bombed Laos and attacked North Vietnam and yet had denied both to the public. The Senate chambers were thrown into commotion and he was nearly shouted down. The incident didn’t make it onto the evening news but I knew about it because it was covered in the
Post
and the
Times
themselves, and in the
Courier-Express
, all of which I’d begun to read now on my own.
    I’d been reading newspapers now, in fact, ever since the morning I’d met Glenn Burrant. In those days Liam Metarey subscribed to dozens of them, which I