Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

“Go tell them you’re sick and have to leave right now. Don’t wait for the gavel. Meet me in ten minutes on the southwest corner.” He made it there in eight, after lying to Tommy McIntyre, racing back to Potter’s office in the Capitol, shutting his desk lamp, and, once he saw Hawkins’ big green Buick waiting for him outside the SOB, wondering if he’d left any lights burning at home. He realized now that they were going away. To Charlottesville, for the weekend, Hawk explained. He sat in silence all the way over the Memorial Bridge and through the red-bricked garden apartments of Arlington, offering no argument or banter, nothing that began “You’re forgiving me?” He said nothing at all, as if, unlike the doubtful Private Schine, he really were a hostage, one who at any moment might be thrown out upon the open road. Hawkins, too, all the way to Manassas with the radio off, said nothing. But no, this could only be good, could only be another miracle on the order of Hawkins’ telephone call to the Star last September.