Free Upgrade Degrade by Daniel J. Kirk Page B

and repugnant. Though I still drank it every time he asked me to. I wanted to see how far he’d try to take it. He didn’t know that I couldn’t get drunk. And sometimes I’d play drunk and say things I wasn’t supposed to. Sometimes I was provoked by Rickey.  I always caught myself before it went anywhere that I’d regret—and Samuel Winter liked the chase.
    “He’s not ready,” Samuel Winter said. “But he’s getting there.”
    “We just need more people to see this side of him. What about an anti-campaign? Just have him go places and not say who he is until people want to know who they just met?”
    “It’s a good idea.”
    “But you don’t like it.”
    “He’s almost everything you wanted, isn’t he? He’s going to break boundaries. Make millions question their beliefs…”
    “Are you talking about Jesus or Duke Hall?” I asked, and gave a gentle nudge with my elbow.
    “Politicians are symbols. We just need one that projects that glimmer where people can see they were wrong about something they swore was fact. He’ll do that. He’s not what he looks like on paper.”
    “It’s not just the south that’s super racist,” I said.
    “People aren’t racists anymore. They just hate thugs and complainers. But that guilt, that hope to prove they aren’t racists will get them to line up at the polls.”
    “I would hope it had more to do with what he’s saying. That he intends to represent the state as it wants to be represented.”
    “Yeah, he keeps saying that,” Samuel Winter said. “It’s such an on-the-fence statement. He’s not going to win any of the crazies’ votes with that. He needs to slip up. Say something just a little extreme.”
    Extreme? These nachos aren’t extreme.
    Rickey must pick up on some of my thoughts. He was eating a non-spicy variety of nachos, but for some reason he thought ‘extreme’ at the same moment Samuel Winter had said it. Maybe there were lines in our connection that were not as obvious as when I speak to him and when his mind thinks out loud. Maybe there was also a way for him to suppress his thoughts. Think on a different channel. I wish I knew. I wish I could fix that.
    “Have you toured the Governor’s Mansion?” Samuel Winter asked.
    “No.”
    “I’ve been here before. There’s a door in the coat check. It was built for avoiding the press—or emergency evacuations. It leads out onto the lawn.”
    “Where else does it lead?” I asked.
    “Why don’t we find out?”
    My smile had a hard time, so I chugged the champagne and it rose a little more. Samuel Winter acknowledged a few folks on our way to the coat check. It was one of those ones seen in movies. Dark wood panels surrounded all sides, with ornate molding at every possible level—floor, chair, crown, and wainscoting. Samuel Winter rifled through coats and then shifted a piece of molding. A latch popped. The whole backside of the coat closet opened, from the floor to the twelve-foot high ceiling. The hall was short and had appeared to only be a simple alcove with a potted plant, an expensive painting and bench before. We closed the wall behind us and were in a corridor that ran along the rear of the mansion with floor to ceiling windows on one side and portraits of past governors on the other.
    As soon as we stepped out into the night sky, I knew that Rickey was looking at the same sky. He couldn’t be far. He was down in the bottom, at a bar having drinks with some girl. Some girl. Some girl. Relax, I told myself. He’s not attracted to her. She’s spunky… She’s... Libby.
    “Beautiful night,” Samuel Winter said. “It’s a little nippy isn’t it?”
    I checked myself thinking he’d implied more than the slight coolness in the air. His hand navigated around the small of my back, found an appropriate place to settle just above my hipbone.
    “I’m drunk,” I lied.
    “You never seem drunk,” he said.
    “We should head back inside.”
    “Come on. I want to show you