The Governor's Wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

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