The Ex-President

by Jeff Soloway

  “Okay. I understand. Can I just grab a pillow to sit on?” The pillow was next to my mother’s note.

  Jimbo sprang up from the desk. “What do you keep looking at?”

  Once, on a late-afternoon hike in Yosemite, I heard a rustle and turned from the trail to see, halfway up a forested slope, a bear. It lifted its head, and then, as quick and agile as a squirrel, leaped up onto a log to stare at me. The grace, balance, and power displayed in one instant by that fat ungainly behemoth made me appreciate the dangers of the wilderness more than a hundred National Geographic specials.

  Jimbo’s sudden movement was just as terrifying. In an instant, he was at the bed.

  “What is that?”

  I watched from the floor as he snatched up my mother’s note. “Just a—”

  “Shut up.” He had to hold the paper down by his crotch to read it, but this time there was no furrowing of the brow. He frowned and nodded. “Your mom wrote this. Pres. Buffoon.”

  I shrugged as best as I could while seated. “She likes to joke around—”

  “She likes to laugh at him. She kisses him on his fucking mouth and then turns to you and laughs at him. She’s thinks he’s an idiot. Let’s see how much Chomp laughs when I show it to him. Oh boy. She’s gonna be sorry.”

  “It’s just a pet name.”

  “The president’s nobody’s pet.” He pulled out his cellphone and held it low to study the screen. “You know what I’m doing? I’m texting the president direct. I’ve still got his number. We communicate. We used to. Fuck. He’s on the island. No Wi-Fi.”

  He put away his phone.

  “She’s screwed. Just as bad as you are. Yeah, Chomp loves getting laughed at. Just like you laughed when you screwed me over. Wait till Chomp sees it. I might even get promoted for sharp investigation.”

  He folded the note and jammed it in his back pocket. Just as Chomp used his enemies’ scorn to rally his supporters, so this man was planning to use my mother’s scorn to get back in Chomp’s good graces.

  His jacket had flapped open as he swooped to the bed, so I knew he had no gun at his shoulders or hips. The gray grizzle at the underside of his chin glittered in the lamplight. He was old. He was fat. The toes of his black shoes were right before me, foothills to a looming mountain.

  “Did you murder Clark Wolfson?” I asked. “Or was it your partner? I know it was one of you. I have evidence.”

  “Fuck you. What do you know? I don’t do murders. I do executions.”

  “He was a decent man. He liked Chomp.”

  “He was an agent of the Witch.”

  “They needed a murder. Clark was in a room all alone, close to Chomp. He was the perfect target. Chomp had you kill him for a publicity stunt. The networks were ignoring him. Even Fox. No one would cover his speech. No one cared. He was no agent. They lied to you. They always lie. Don’t let them play you.”

  The black wings of Harvey’s hair fluttered a little. He eyes glazed over in thought. He was thinking. He was a Sudoku player. He had a logical mind. Was he the one Chompian who would let reason challenge his faith?

  “You were the guy’s friend,” he said slowly. “So was your mom. Now it all fits. You want to bring Chomp down. Stand up.”

  Slowly, watchfully, I got to my feet.

  James shook his arms, flinging his fingers like he was sprinkling water. He rolled the grizzled chuck of his head around on his shoulders. This is what thick middle-aged men do to limber up. Apparently we were going to fight. Good. It was my best chance to get out of this room.

  Jimbo—James—finished limbering and widened his stance. I lifted my hands. He was probably stronger than me, but I was younger, slimmer, and quicker. He lifted one hand high, as if winding up for a volleyball slam. I tensed my muscles, prepared to dodge and then strike back.

  His body and hand lurched forward, just as I’d anticipated. But as I leaned to avoid the blow, I felt something totally unexpected—his heel landing on my instep. In the instant just after I registered the impact but before the sensation of it zipped up through my nervous system to my brain, I felt an overwhelming horror. This was going to be surpassingly painful.

  It was.

  It felt like my foot had been first ripped open and then plunged into boiling water. James removed his foot and stepped back to rebalance himself. All I could do was peer feebly through the wildfire of pain to watch his next move. He seemed to be extracting something from his pocket. By the time I saw his fist coming, it was too late. The blow on my temple knocked me sideways onto my mother’s bed.

  The explosion in my head added to my suffering. My brain cells now had two centers of conflagration to process. I’d never experienced such an onslaught of pain. This man had done nothing clever or tricky and had still destroyed me so quickly. Where do people learn this? Who teaches them? How many victims had he practiced on?

  “Remember this next time you laugh at us. Remember someday you might meet one of us, face-to-face, alone in a locked room.”

  He pushed me over on my stomach. His hands were as hard as pumpkin rinds. I felt a weight on my ass. He must have sat on it. My head was mashed into some rayon garment. He clamped my left arm to my side. He seized my right forearm and thrust it upward behind my back in a hammerlock. I was helpless. Then he shoved my forearm higher. The bone was about to crack, I could feel it. All the previous pain was forgotten. The present was all there was.

  “Keep on wiggling! Just makes it worse.”

  There was no way this could get worse.

  And then that blast of pain in my arm eased, and the weight on my body lifted. All the old pains in the old places finished their breaks and got back to work, refreshed. My mind cleared just enough for me to remember to breathe.

  “This is a new country. We changed the rules. Want a lawyer? Forget it. Want to file a complaint? Just try. There’s no ACLU, no Legal Aid, no loopholes. We are the law. Look at me.”

  I tried to turn my head.

  “I said look at me!” He grabbed me by the hair and jerked my head up. I was staring straight into his eyes, round yellow-brown amulets that gave him all the power he needed.

  The rapid repositioning of my head, combined with innumerable painful pinpricks where the hair met my scalp, finally overwhelmed my system. Panic grabbed the controls of my body and punched Eject. I threw up.

  “You disgusting fuck!”

  James leaped back, shaking his hand as if a bird had shat on it. Flying off his fingertips were red-brown particles of shrimp cocktail. The mass of it was all over the rug and mattress in front of me. I pressed my palm to my mouth, to hold in more puke. To avoid provoking him further.

  James ripped some garment off a hook and hurled it at my face. “Clean it up, slob!”

  I wiped my mouth. The slick fabric could do nothing more than smear the stuff. I needed a moment of calm, just a moment to think, to try to master the pain in my body and let the tornado in my brain blow itself out. Just a moment of peace. But James was coming closer. What would he do now?

  “You’re disgusting.” He glowered down at his arms and his clothes. I was saved, for the moment, by his daintiness. “Don’t move.” He shrugged out of his blazer and stalked to the bathroom. I heard water running.

  I tried to move my right arm. It seemed to function. I hoped my foot did too. I dragged a pillow, as heavy as an armchair, over the half-stain of puke on the mattress. The rest of the stuff had jetted onto the carpet, or onto him. The smell roiled my stomach further. I was shamefully afraid to move off the bed, to break his rules. He was making them up on the spot, but to me they were life and death—no, more than life or death, they were respite or agony. He was right. No rules mattered but his. The only rule James had to follow was Don’t Piss Off the President. He had failed once and learned his lesson. He was now terrifyingly confident that nothing he could do to m
e would piss him off again.

  James returned. “We’re gonna need towels, lots of them. Where are the fucking towels in this room?”

  He hadn’t seen them on the floor of the shower.

  “They took them,” I croaked.

  “What?”

  “They took them away. My mom said they were dirty.”

  “What is she, some Jew?”

  “The steward.” I sounded pitifully helpful. “He has more.”

  “We don’t need no stinking steward.” He laughed at his bandito impersonation. “I know where they stash towels. I know everything. Don’t move.”

  “I gotta puke again,” I said.

  He tossed the wastebasket at my face. “Puke there, asshole. Try to run, I swear to God I’ll dig out your fucking eye.”

  He left the door to the room cracked open, not quite wide enough for someone to see in.

  The pain seemed to be worse when I breathed, so I tried holding my breath. I took what felt like the greatest risk in my life and sat partially up.

  I could hear James’s voice from the hallway outside: “Hey! Guy! I need towels. Don’t go in that room.”

  And a cheery, whistle-while-you-work response: “Certainly! How many, sir?”

  I rocked backward to get my body moving, and used the momentum to help me stand up. My foot moaned but took the weight. I set off, staggering, toward the bathroom. I pressed the handle lock on the inside, stepped back into the stateroom, and shut the bathroom door behind me, without turning the handle. If it stayed locked, it might delay him.

  “All you got,” James was saying. “Big ones.”

  My juiced-up brain, perhaps to distract from my pain and my panic, insisted on analyzing the steward’s plight. He was in charge of a dozen staterooms full of couples and families, and this Chompian bozo was demolishing his towel supply. But you could never refuse your guests; all you could do was hope to deflect their requests with politeness and promises and, if they persisted, give in and plot to acquire a new supply, perhaps calling in a favor or perhaps just filching from a colleague.

  This rational interlude calmed the screaming part of my brain just enough. I edged around the bed to the curtain of hanging clothes at the back end of the room. Harvey had assumed I had a window, not a balcony. So, presumably, had James, or he wouldn’t have left me alone. I slipped my hand between a pantsuit jacket and a spangly T-shirt, found the handle of the balcony door, and pushed it open a few inches. I slipped through the fabrics and crammed myself out onto the balcony. The hanging clothes swayed from my disturbance, agitated ghosts who were unable to cry out. I pulled the door shut behind me.

  The air outside was cool and moist now that night had come. The ship was still cruising, but the island was so close that I could see the swaying moon-silvered tops of palm trees. Down below, the sea frothed and spat against the ship’s hull. I could no longer hear James’s voice in the hall, but the pressure of his imminent return was at the back of my mind, trying to push me over the balcony and into the churning wake below. I wasn’t much of a swimmer.

  White plastic shields guarded both sides of the balcony. If I managed, with my good foot, to kick through one, perhaps I could leap onto the next-door balcony. But even if I did so, and then managed to smash through the locked balcony door, I would only end up an intruder in the next room over. The inhabitants would scream when they saw me. James would come. The only law was his.

  Down was the only way. The balcony railing was topped by a smooth wooden bar about as wide as a car’s bumper. I leaned over it. Was that the sound of the front door opening in the room behind me?

  “Hey!”

  I almost leaped for the sea, but the voice was coming from below. My neighbor, the man who had needed a corkscrew, was staring up at me from the lower balcony. He raised a Michelob Ultra in salute. “Where’s your wife?”

  I tried to arrange my lips into a friendly smile. I felt like I was going to puke again.

  Now I definitely heard the stateroom’s front door slam shut behind me. Jimbo’s voice drifted through the veiled glass of the balcony door, but faintly, as it had to contend with the breeze and the sea. “Are you in there?” He must be yelling at the bathroom. “Finish puking and get out.”

  I leaned farther over the railing. Don’t panic. Don’t make him scream. “She’s watching TV,” I said. “Help me play a joke?”

  “What kind of joke?”

  “Hold on.”

  I planted my hands on the rim of the railing, like a gymnast on the pommel horse, and swung my left leg over until I was straddling it. My aching right arm almost collapsed from the pain. I pressed against both sides of the railing with my legs, as if I were clinging to a real horse.

  My neighbor laughed. “What are you up to?”

  Just please shut up. Both of my feet were suspended, the right over the floor of my balcony, the left on the outside, in the open air. There was nothing below my left arm but an edge of protruding balcony on the floor below and then the night air, the foam of the wake, the depths of the sea. The breeze was hard on my outside leg. It wanted to rip me off the boat.

  “You nut,” the neighbor said. “You and your wife. I married older myself. Only way to go. Older meat. Fully seasoned.”

  I heard Jimbo’s voice, fainter in volume but enormous in my mind: “Time’s up, asshole.”

  I picked up my left hand—the less painful one—from the handrail, and smacked it down behind my ass. I leaned back and balanced agonizingly on that back hand. I lifted my front hand, and swung my inside leg over the railing. Now I was seated sidesaddle on the railing, both legs dangling out over the tumultuous wake, both hands on the inside part of the railing. Holding my body in. The breeze was now a roar.

  “What the fuck?”

  I couldn’t look at my neighbor.

  I heard a pounding within my room. James was hammering, or kicking, at the bathroom door.

  I was facing two terrors, the fear of falling and the fear of James. Again I found myself desperately craving time. If only I could slink off for a moment, find some cave in the mountainside or unlit supply closet deep within the boat, and gather my courage. Do this and you can rest, I lied to myself. The pain in my arms was increasing.

  “Hey, buddy, get back!”

  What an asshole. You’re supposed to try to calm people in dangerous situations, not stress them further. Inside my room, I heard a crash and then a roar.

  James had kicked through the bathroom door.

  My misgivings were flushed from my mind. I took a deep breath, as if I were diving into deep water, and mentally giggled, because I probably was. I leaned slightly forward. At the same time, I positioned my hands so they were both grabbing hold of the top of the railing to my right, fingers facing in toward the ship.

  It seemed to take forever for my butt cheeks to slip completely off the railing. In the meantime, I heard two things: a deep, almost choking, gasp from below, and a new series of stomps and crashes from above. James was tearing up the room.

  I twisted my body as I slipped off the railing so I faced the ship, and I kept my hands gripped tight to the top of the railing. With every cell of muscle in my fingers, arms, and wrists, I managed to keep hold. My right arm tried to do its share. I knew it couldn’t last long. My stomach was pressed against the bottom of the balcony, my butt and back to the sea. My toes were in space. I was hanging on over the water.

  “Fucking crazy!” the neighbor screamed.

  I heard James howling, closer now. I let go.

  As I fell I kicked my legs in toward the ship, hoping I would land on the balcony below and not plummet to the sea. Something walloped my back, and my ass landed on the lower balcony railing, and somehow I tumbled to the bottom of the balcony, bashing my head and scraping my back in the process. I looked up, and my neighbor stood over me, one foot braced
against the balcony wall, his head just inches from mine. He must have shoved me inside as I fell. He had tried to save my life. Maybe he had saved it.

  “Ho!” I leaped to my feet. Fire shot up from my bad foot.

  “You’re fucking nuts!” But he was pounding my shoulders, pumped up by his own part of the escapade.

  Above us, I thought I heard the balcony door slide open.

  I stepped through my neighbor’s open balcony door. His wife lay on the bed, already in her nightgown. She stared at me. I shot her a little smile and a what-the-hell shrug. Guys like me jump from balconies all the time. My foot suddenly felt a little better.

  I put my finger to my lips. “I’m playing a joke on my wife.”

  “Pretty funny,” she said.

  And then from outside, I heard a bellow that seemed to shake the frame of the glass doors. It might have contained my name, or just an expletive. It certainly came from above. Both man and wife looked questioningly out to the balcony. The sound had a force that could have halted the ship and the sea itself. But not me. I was already out the door.

  Chapter 20

  I strolled down the hallway toward the elevators, or rather, I tried to make my body stroll. My foot ached with every step, my head throbbed, and my back felt like it had been flayed with a metal rake. My arm, oddly, was now merely tingling. My ears strained for the stampede of oncoming security men. Would they shoot me on sight, or just toss me back in the cage with James?

  The hallway was stretching like toffee as I walked. No hallway should be this long. In an emergency, passengers would starve before they reached the lifeboats. I had too much time to think.

  James would be hunting for me. But assuming I could get off this floor, he would have to hunt through a huge, crowded ship. My mother, on the other hand, was trapped with Chomp right now. James would tell Chomp about her supposed betrayal as soon as he could. Luckily, Chomp’s phone wouldn’t work on the island. I had to get her off the island before James could inform against her. Unlike my father and me, she had no idea she was in danger.