two:
sunday noon

As the sidewalk tightened and the crush of followers grew, Duncan Bloom elbowed his way to the front, not wanting to lose sight of the candidate. That would be a cardinal no-no. The throng had grown tight with fans and bystanders and tourists caught up in a rock star wave of excitement. The crowd bulged out onto the road and police worked to keep one lane of traffic open.

Autographs, handshakes, hi-how-are-you’s.

Repeat. Smile.

Bloom took notes and a picture with his cell phone. Visual notes.

Tom Lamott, the center of attention, wore a white golf shirt with the campaign logo over faded jeans. The golf shirt hinted at country club. The pants said weekend dad. He stood six-three. His head bobbed in the stew of humanity. The overall frame was lanky—maybe two hundred pounds. His healthy color and relaxed smile belied the fact that he had survived a grueling primary fight to represent Colorado in the U.S. Senate as a Democrat.

Across the street, a band of silent protesters stood vigil. There were six in this group, the third such band Bloom had spotted on Lamott’s walk down Grand Avenue.

“Duncan?” The voice came from behind him, along with a gentle tap on the bicep.

His profile of Trudy Heath had earned Bloom a statewide award for feature writing. For multiple reasons, Trudy was hardly an unknown before Bloom wrote about her. The Denver papers and a few national outlets had followed the story of how her ex-husband had murdered two guides and rigged hunts for high-end clients. Trudy, who had been confined to her house due to an untreated case of epilepsy and who had been kept in the dark about the ugly side of her husband’s operation, emerged like a butterfly from the dark cocoon.

She was now watching her regional celebrity rise through the explosion of her regional brand of herbs, pestos, and other natural food products. Bloom had written a piece marking the three-year anniversary of the arrest of her husband, George Grumley, and a few shorter pieces about her role leading the green movement in and around Glenwood Springs. Bloom had written a catch-up profile on Trudy and had met and interviewed her boyfriend and business manager, Jerry Paige, and thought he had made friends.

“How are you?” said Bloom.

“Good,” said Trudy. “I had to hear Tom Lamott myself. Something more than the news clips, you know?”

Trudy Heath glowed with a woodsy charm. She exuded quiet confidence. You looked into her eyes, insanely white where they weren’t creamy brown, and you found yourself thinking about green vegetables, plump tomatoes, and life as a vitamin vacuum.

“Mind if I quote you?”

Trudy smiled. “Not this time, okay?”

“Sure,” said Bloom. “How’s Allison?”

In Bloom’s brief time in Glenwood Springs, no feature assignment had lingered longer than the Trudy Heath profile. First, for meeting Trudy and absorbing her grounded, serene view of the world. Second, for meeting the mysterious and slightly more inscrutable Allison Coil, who had dropped in during the lunch Trudy had prepared in her part-greenhouse cabin-cum-house on the edge of the Flat Tops. For Bloom, the sight of Allison made him want to know every scrap of her mind, heart, and flesh, and how those elements came together to form this intriguing woman from the wilderness, who might have been bred from some magical concoction of tree bark and horse sweat. The day lingered in his memory like a gift from another world, where concerns of the big city didn’t interfere. Certainly Allison Coil had sprung whole from the Flat Tops and he tried to hide his surprise when he learned later that she had emigrated from the big city.

“She’s fine,” said Trudy. “She’s up there somewhere today, doing some scouting,” said Trudy.

“I’d love to go riding with her sometime,” said Bloom. The thought of having a shot at Allison Coil had stayed with him for weeks. He hadn’t sensed a half-encouraging smile from her, but the fantasy stuck. He was in good shape and a series of Denver girlfriends had enjoyed his company. Now that he had moved to the high country, mountain hikes kept him fit and trim. He let his brown hair grow shaggy between haircuts and let his wardrobe reduce itself to blue jeans, a series of pullovers, simple shirts, and running shoes. His last girlfriend, a lefty lawyer who worked on water issues, told him he could have passed for Tom Hanks’ younger brother. Basically, that told Bloom that his everyday-okay appearance only meant he might get his foot in the front door.

“I’m sure she’d take you,” said Trudy. “It’s a matter of setting something up. But not for another story, right?”

“Just for fun,” said Bloom.

The throng crammed in around the Doc Holliday Tavern, where Grand Avenue climbed the bridge over the Colorado River. Lamott stayed on street level, heading to the footbridge that paralleled the vehicle traffic bridge. Lamott’s itinerary, the one e-mailed to all reporters, noted that Lamott would make a statement here, at the base of the footbridge, before heading over, alone.

“Does he do it for you?”

“He’s impressive,” said Trudy.

“What is it about him—can you put your finger on it?”

Trudy mulled the question, raised her neat dark-brown eyebrows, a shade darker than her hair. Her features were delicate but she looked like she could handle anything, including long days digging and turning soil. “His ideas seem so grounded in the way this country works—helping to fix problems, not getting sucked into the shrill yelling matches.”

Bloom said good-bye to Trudy and wedged his way closer to Lamott, who had made his way up on a step of the footbridge.

Lamott held up his hand and the crowd grew quiet. Somebody handed him a microphone connected to a portable amp.

Every detail covered and right on time.

“My name is Tom Lamott and I’m a politician. You know there are two kinds of politicians, don’t you?” He paused, smiled. “Yep, two kinds. The first kind can talk nonsense on any subject under the sun. The second kind don’t need a subject.”

Lamott launched into his canned speech. Bloom had heard every talking point through YouTube videos and coverage in the Denver papers. Lamott laid out his vision for embracing Mexico as a neighbor, treating them like a neighbor.

Crowd about half Hispanic.

Lamott’s campaign challenge involved turning out the vote in November, but his team had already shown enough organizational skill that Republicans were petrified.

Lamott reached the end of his five-minute stump spiel. He paused, looked around, smiled.

Crowd quiet, attentive. Usual themes. Boyishly confident.

Bloom had read the next section of Lamott’s speech online. Ad nauseum. It was the sensation, all the rage. It had landed Tom Lamott a mention in Time Magazine and the New York Times and, of course, Univision.

Lamott started speaking in Spanish.

It wasn’t broken, token foreign language. His Spanish had depth, nuance. Bloom had spent a summer in Cozumel and had soaked up as much conversational Spanish as anyone, but when Lamott spoke in Spanish, the accents and inflections seemed natural.

This isn’t Kennedy’s Ich Bin Ein Berliner. This is a politician who wants to communicate.

“Nobody is saying the United States of America should abandon the English language,” said Lamott. “Hardly.”

Lamott smiled. He watched the statement sink in.

This was all said in Spanish, but Bloom could follow along with the script e-mailed (“please keep the Earth in mind should you choose to print this document”) in advance.

“But to work with each other—and I would suggest that the United States and Mexico not only must work together, but that we rely on each other—we must understand each other. And what better way than to speak each other’s languages, I ask you?” Famously, Lamott had learned every lick of Spanish in his middle and high school years at a public school, the Denver Center for International Studies, and then the University of Colorado, where he had double majored in Spanish and Political Science.

Ronald Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall. Tom Lamott wants to bring down the tortilla curtain.

A photographer draped with a bundle of cameras around his neck stood two stairs up and behind Lamott, snapping away.

“Thank you, Glenwood Springs,” said Lamott. “Thank you for your hospitality. We all know there are challenges today—primarily economic—and we must work together to repair what’s broken. We can do that if we work together, if we find common ground and agree on a plan. I know words are easy. The work is hard. But if we’re committed to do it, we can find a way.”

No script. Metal water bottle in one hand. Audience rapt.

Briefly, Bloom thought Lamott caught his eye. And Bloom wondered if Lamott knew that the reporter who had hounded him in Denver now worked in Glenwood Springs.

“If you want to see conditions deteriorate with your neighbors, you build higher fences, point fingers, and make up scary scenarios that play on fears. I believe we can do better. Come November, I hope you will give me a chance.”

The immigration “problem” had faded as a front-burner campaign issue with fewer immigrants making their way illegally across the border—lower birth rates in Mexico, for one, and scarce jobs in the United States, for two. But hatred simmered.

Wild applause. Whoops like a sporting event.

Again Lamott seemed to look over and nod in Bloom’s direction.

No matter what had happened in Denver, Bloom would treat this day like any reporter covering any campaign stop. He considered himself pretty good at burying the hatchet.

“Now the campaign manager wants a few pictures of me on the bridge. I need a few minutes alone up there. Again, thank you to each and every one of you.”

He respects his audience. Or fakes it extremely well.

Standing in the throng of Lamott’s supporters now, Bloom thought he could feel the city turn, ever so slightly, on its collective heels.

Lamott’s official media spokesperson, the young and stunning Stacey Trujillo, who had first greeted Bloom when Lamott stepped off his bus back in Sayre Park, gave Bloom a head nod as if to say “follow me.” Bloom wedged his way through the crowd and up the pedestrian bridge.

“Just wanted to make sure you’ve got all you need,” she said.

“Is it like this everywhere?” asked Bloom. “This kind of a turnout?”

“It’s insane,” she said. “In a good way.”

Over the first part of the bridge going north, steel mesh siding rose about twelve feet on both sides. You could walk over the Colorado River and then the four lanes of Interstate 70, but you couldn’t jump and kill yourself and you couldn’t throw any crap over, either. The northern half of the footbridge had a railing of more or less regular waist-high height and more mesh from the grade level up to the railing. You could jump, Bloom supposed, but you’d land in the parking lot of the hot springs pool and at least they wouldn’t have to put boats in the water to fish you out.

Ahead, Tom Lamott posed, smiling and then not smiling, leaning on the rail and then standing more erect, arms folded over his chest.

The photographer took pictures at a rapid-fire pace, from fifteen feet away.

The first bullet smacked metal near Lamott. A sharp zzz-ting.

Bloom ducked, put his arm up in a gesture of useless reflex. The sound alone was mean and violent.

Stacey let out a yelp like she’d been goosed. The photographer froze.

The second zzz-ting struck closer to Bloom than the first. Bloom’s skin prickled. Stacey yelped again.

The third shot had the zzz but no ting and Bloom heard Lamott cry out like he’d been punched. His white golf shirt blossomed bright red at his shoulder.

The fourth shot caught Lamott as he buckled and he spun. He crumpled and rolled, ended up on his back.

Bloom grabbed his phone. Password in, phone button pushed.

Don’t blow this.

He dialed, flattened down. He tried to crawl under the asphalt.

Bloom looked out through the mesh and up the river, scanning. There was nobody on top of the train station. The river looked normal. He crab-walked over to Lamott, stayed low.

“911 Emergency. May I help you?”

A woman’s voice. Calm.

Stacey sobbed. Bloom stared out through the steel mesh, searching for anything out of place in the riverside bushes or woods that covered the slope in the far distance, upriver.

The rip in his shirt offered an ugly window into Lamott’s upper chest—blood gushed from the cavity and raced down his neck. The blood pooled black behind his head. Between pulses of red fluid, a shattered bone, most likely clavicle, revealed jagged edges. The sound coming from Lamott’s throat was a dry rasp. Agony. Shock. His mouth was frozen open in horror and disbelief. Desperation filled Lamott’s eyes. Lamott’s look might have been the same if he was falling backward off El Capitan.

“Are you there?” asked the voice in Bloom’s ear. “Are you there?”