The Ex-President

by Jeff Soloway

  “Shut up, Jacob,” my mother whispered, when Jimbo turned his back. “I have a plan. He’ll listen to me. He already fell in love and I was hardly trying.”

  A dozen guards marched us down the beach. I wiggled my tingling fingers to maintain circulation. A few Chompian gawkers trotted beside us and screamed obscenities.

  A whistle sounded overhead and the sky burst into a weird pink. Startled, all of us—prisoners, guards, and persecutors—looked up to see a hundred squiggly heat trails arcing above us. Our hair and faces were bathed in a glow that reminded me of the diluted bloodstains in the sink in Shell’s bathroom. Then we heard the boom overhead, as mighty as a crack in the firmament, but absurd now that we knew what had caused it. Just some cruise ship frivolity. I looked back toward the pirate ship. The crow’s nest was lit and a woman was dancing on it. Not Erica. I tried to give my mother an encouraging smile but she refused to look at me.

  Our persecutors, now fewer in number and farther from the fun than they wanted to be, turned to trudge back.

  We started to resume our journey, but one guard said to the others, “Hold on. Chomp’s got to be first.”

  We stood in the sand and endured a few more sky-mutating explosions. At least I now knew they were taking us to Chomp. If he let me start talking, I could make him listen.

  In an interlude between neon blasts, someone pointed to the sea. Red lights were floating on the water like shooting stars come to earth. Two, three, half a dozen—more the longer I looked. “Ships,” a guard said.

  Jimbo nodded. “Let’s go.”

  We started again down the beach.

  “Just like he said,” my mother murmured. “The Navy, the Coast Guard, the yachts from Fisher Island. All his people coming to him. How can someone so stupid be right all the time?”

  Jimbo stopped and turned around. He’d heard her. He turned to her and lifted his open hand. I had to stop him, and my hands were bound.

  “The balcony! I jumped from it, Mom!” I meant to boast of my escape from him. I think my brain was trying to form some ingenious action-man pun, like I dropped in on our neighbors, but panic garbled my cleverness. Rather than James Bond, I sounded like a proud five-year-old.

  But my words did their job. Jimbo, as I had intended, turned to me. The sky overhead transformed silently to green. His face was greener than the Witch’s.

  His smack knocked me to my knees, but my mother was able to grab my forearm with her cuffed hands—good for something besides prayer after all. The fireworks boom obliterated Jimbo’s shout. I stood stooped over, afraid to stand too straight and get knocked all the harder to the ground again. My mother slapped two-handedly at the sand on my knees and shins. Jimbo watched my mother’s work. The rest of the guards, their faces also a sickly green, stared dully at Jimbo. Their eyes seemed to suck away his anger. He refrained from further punishment. Just as some raging policemen will come to their senses when confronted with the gaze of many judging cellphone eyes, so Jimbo was not quite ready to reveal his inner berserker to his friends. He would stow his fury for now. He hoped to have me alone again soon.

  Now at last my mother caught my eye. She wanted me to know that she understood and appreciated my gesture.

  Over the dune. The rows of yurts, gray in the moonlight, now looked to me like old gravestones, their dents and angles marks of age, not sloppy construction. Two figures stood together beside the central monument, the larger laying his hands on the smaller’s shoulder, like one mourner consoling another. A light shone from the yurt’s open flap, and reflected off Shell’s face and up to Chomp. Her hair had come undone in the mayhem of the speech. She was finally having her audience.

  My mother sighed. We trudged to Chomp’s yurt. The whole troop of us had to pass by them. We could even hear Chomp thanking Shell for her commitment, as he must have condescended so many times to praise local volunteers. Did he know that she had heroically managed to overcome her sympathy for the enemy? Her eyes darted at me as I passed, as if she worried I might spill the secret.

  Before I entered the yurt, I looked back and saw another group of figures cresting the dune. It was the beautiful reporter, stately in his dark suit, accompanied by a dozen troll-like companions lugging equipment.

  Inside the yurt, Harvey was sitting on a folding chair. He smiled generously at my mother, his defeated rival. My mother, taking his smile for permission, sat on the rumpled futon. Her face was composed. She had, after all, rumpled that futon herself. I dropped myself carefully down beside her; she held my elbow to help me with balance. Jimbo, the only guard who entered, assisted by laying his hand on my shoulder and grinding it into my collarbone. I was ready for pain from his first touch and was able to remain silent, but I must have winced. My mother bit her lip. Jimbo finished his ministrations and stepped away to the curved wall. He had to bow his head piously to keep from knocking it on the outer edge of the conical ceiling.

  I started to speak: “I want to talk to—”

  My mother immediately interrupted. “It went very nicely, Harvey.”

  He wasn’t buying her self-possession. “Just do what I say. You should never leave a guy like that. Makes you look guilty. But you’ll be all right.”

  “I think Carlton has misunderstood my son. I can explain.”

  “Don’t explain. Just obey. You saw the ships? Good start, but not enough. You can help us. Jimbo! Is the satellite TV set up?”

  “They’re working on it.”

  “They better work quick. The president will want to watch. They’ll be featuring him all night, no doubt. But he’s got to get some sleep too.”

  “I have something he needs,” I said.

  Harvey laughed. “No one cares about you.”

  “I do,” Jimbo said.

  “Down, boy. They have a job to do first.”

  My mother nudged my leg with a pinkie jutting from her clasped hands. I suspected the secret gesture was intended to bolster her own confidence under the guise of reassuring me. But I knew she remained hopeful. She believed that her intimacy with Chomp had given her insight into his tender places. She would devote all her talents to exploiting them. She thought she possessed the key to his heart. I doubted it. Chomp had proven himself supremely skilled at changing his mind. His principles were subsumed to the needs of his public persona, to the point where even he failed to understand most of them. How could anyone else hope to know which were real?

  I could. I did. I had found the key, not to Chomp’s heart, but to his mind. To his motivations and machinations.

  Chomp had to stoop to enter his yurt. His face was flushed from the intensity of his speech and perhaps also from the pleasure of his interlude with Shell. He pulled out a chair and poured his body into it. He looked exhausted and extremely pleased. The evening had gone not as he’d planned but as he’d hoped. “Where’s the TV?”

  “The nerds are working on the satellite Internet.” Harvey pronounced all the syllables of satellite Internet carefully.

  “Can I hook up my phone? A night like this, a night that will live on in history, calls for tweets.”

  “Why would you—”

  “It was a beautiful performance, Carlton.” My mother’s clear voice sounded over Harvey’s grumbling like the oboe that organizes the instruments. “Mostly.”

  Chomp seemed to notice her for the first time. “Losing is not something you should take personally.” He flashed the grin of a man who wouldn’t know.

  “I admit to being disappointed.”

  “I never get disappointed. I get pissed, I get revenge, I get over it. Lay out the situation for them, Harv.”

  Harvey gripped the arms of his folding chair and leaned toward us to intimidate with sheer bulk. His earlobes swayed ponderously. “All you need to do is confess. We know you tried to steal our secrets. First the B & E in the presidential suite, then the honeypot tra
p. We’re not saying you murdered anybody. You don’t have to confess to that if you don’t want. Maybe you never knew Suarez the assassin, maybe he was from a different agency. But spying for Farthing—that’s too obvious to deny. The team from Fox is waiting to come tape you. If you confess, you’re okay. If you go rogue—we arrest you. Remember, this is our country. We run the trials. Jimbo runs the jail. So tell the truth. How’s that sound?”

  “Crap as usual, Harv.” Chomp thumped a fist like a gavel on his knee. “Listen, Eleanor—and you too, kid—your job is a very tricky one but you are both, after all, extremely crafty, which I admire in people though not particularly in women. You are not just confessing a crime. You are laying out a choice for the viewers, just as we are laying out a choice for you. The war today is not Democrats versus Chomp or Republicans versus Chomp. It is Failing America versus Chomp. The people of this country need to choose between the two. They already went for Chomp once, so another victory should be easy, but now we need—you need—to appeal especially to a particular portion of the people who love me. When you’re on camera, remember you’re talking to regular joes. I always do. We’ve already got the money people. What we need now is the muscle. More than just the military. We need cops, prison guards, private security, park rangers, all those guys with uniforms and guns. They have to sign up to cross the water too. Their wives and kids can wait at home. Because we’ll be coming soon to save them too. We’re not just building a new nation on this island, we’re going to build a new America on top of the old one, with no Congress or Senate or governors or city councils to screw things up. That’s all we want. Our freedom to be in charge.”

  Jimbo smiled as he watched him. The freedom he wanted was the freedom to deal with me.

  “Got that?” Harvey asked.

  But Chomp wasn’t finished: “What about documents? I’m thinking we need some. We’ll say we found emails these two sent to Farthing’s private account. Maybe I personally found them on their laptops. Reporters love emails. Very authentic.”

  “The nerds are on it.”

  My mother was eager to show compliance. “I know exactly what you need, Carlton. We’re cooperative by nature. I’ll tell the story, and Jacob will stand by my side and nod. I think you’ll be very pleased. And then we can go home?”

  Two words dropped like stones from Chomp’s mouth: “We’ll see.”

  My mother looked down at the yurt’s plastic floor, as if to see where the words landed. The floor was sandy from all our feet.

  I looked at the blank television. It was my best hope. I needed more time. “I have a question.”

  “This isn’t a press conference,” Harvey said.

  “My mother fell in love with you,” I said to Chomp. “Doesn’t that give me the right to a question?”

  Jimbo grunted. “Try asking me.”

  Chomp spread his arms grandly. “We will hear the question.”

  “Why did you resign?”

  Jimbo and Harvey looked at him, waiting, it seemed, for one of two things: either the signal to tear me apart or the answer.

  “You had more power than anyone in the world,” I added. “Now you’re in a yurt.”

  Jimbo pushed off from the yurt wall, but Chomp extended and lowered his hand, dimming Jimbo’s anger as he might dim the lights. “You really want to know?” Chomp pointed first at me and then at my mother. “And you?”

  My mother said, “I thought you quit for her.” Jealousy oozed from every word. She knew he liked being jealousy’s object. She was trying one last time to win his sympathy.

  “For who?” He squinted too hard to appear shrewd.

  “For your wife.”

  “For a woman? Please. No. The explanation is simple. As president, I was—I still am—weighed down by history. So many years, so many men, so many losers. I used to see their paintings every day on the way to breakfast: Millard Fillmore, Martin Van Buren, the Harrison boys, Pierce and Polk and Chester Arthur. Who’s even heard of them? And they were the guys who won! The newer guys, it’s worse, they’re not forgotten, they’re laughed at. Carter was a loser, Clinton a sex fiend, Bush One a pussy, Bush Two a lightweight, Obama the single dumbest guy ever. Reagan, okay, I’ll give you Reagan, even though we all know Nancy wiped his ass the whole second term. But will he be remembered in a hundred years? For what? Conquering Grenada? Cutting taxes? You don’t get a Ken Burns series for cutting taxes. When you’re president, you wake up, eat breakfast, watch the news, take a few meetings, make a few calls, and all day you’re thinking, Will they laugh at me too? Or will they just forget me? That fucking corporate tax reform bill doesn’t seem so important in the grand scheme.

  “Now, people remember Lincoln and Washington. One of them freed the slaves, the other his country.” His eyes turned dreamy as he stared past the walls of his yurt and down through history. “Lincoln was a very young man when he was elected. No gray in his picture. I can be young. On the campaign, at the rallies. Tonight.” His eyes snapped back to the present and he smiled at my mother. “With you.”

  “I remember.”

  “You get old quick when you’re president. In eight years, Obama went from rookie point guard to Tubby Smith. Not me. I left while I could. It’s the outsiders who get in the books. I took a chance on history. That’s a tweet, right, Harv?”

  My mother wiped her brow with her doubled wrists. “It’s a magnificent dream, Carlton. Now take one more chance. Let us go. We don’t belong on this island. We have nothing to do with history. Please, Carlton.”

  And here was where all her efforts led.

  But Chomp shook his head. “We can’t. Wait—not true. We can. We just won’t. Because I know your son. He’s thinking, This Chomp guy had so-and-so dumped off the side of the cruise ship and that’s very upsetting to me, so I better alert the media. Well, here’s your chance. We’re putting you on camera. Kid, you can tell any story you want. Now, I wouldn’t recommend screwing us over, because Jimbo here will have his fingers ready for you and your mom’s neck, but you could. And I’m telling you, it wouldn’t matter. I’m beyond a star. I’m a god, an old-fashioned god, one of those you make sacrifices and beat drums to. Some people love me, some people fear me, but no one can kill me. I could walk down the middle of Fifth Avenue at lunchtime and shoot a guy dead and then go finish my burger. What cop would arrest me? What prosecutor would charge me? So maybe you’ve got some ace up your sleeve. Maybe you discovered something special and you wrote it all down and mailed it to The Washington Post. It doesn’t matter. Because you will never discover”—he pounded his chest—“what I have in my heart. It is beyond you and everybody else.”

  “But I did,” I said. “I did discover that.”

  “Good for you. Harvey, can we please now turn on the television?”

  “Jimbo, go see if it’s ready.”

  Jimbo left and returned with a thin, nervous young man whose shirt was mottled with sweat stains. He knelt by the television.

  “I need my phone, Harv,” Chomp said. “I want to send that history tweet, and maybe a few more. A night like this deserves a dozen of my best.”

  “I don’t have your phone,” Harvey said.

  Chomp heaved himself up and opened and closed a drawer in his writing desk. He turned to my mother and gave her—to my surprise—a bashful grin. My mother’s enormous return smile was heartrending in its hopefulness, but Chomp only asked her to scoot aside. After we both did, he thrust his hand under the futon to feel around for his phone. I knew it wasn’t there.

  The nerd stood up and the television came to life. The anchor’s somber intonation told us right away he was performing news rather than analysis. On the screen, a pair of white arrows streaked across a map of the Bahamas, one aimed eastward and one northward, the two converging on a pinprick labeled “Elysian Island.” The anchor said, “Our sources tell us that the special operations c
raft from Andros Island should arrive within minutes.”

  Chomp gave up on the futon. “Did the sources tell you?”

  Harvey shook his head. They were getting the news from CNN just like everyone else.

  The screen changed, and the anchor himself appeared. Now there was space for a header: CARLTON CHOMP WANTED FOR MURDER. The anchor continued:

  “We are following the midnight siege of the island hideout of former president Carlton Chomp, suspected of orchestrating the murder of two passengers on a cruise ship earlier this evening, on what was billed as the Carlton Chomp Comeback Cruise. Gunships from the Coast Guard base at Andros Island as well as mainland Florida are currently en route to intercept and detain the ex-president and members of his staff. The bodies of the two passengers were found in separate staterooms earlier this evening, one stabbed to death and one shot. CNN is in possession of a series of text messages, apparently sent from Chomp’s personal phone, and later forwarded to mainland police and federal authorities by the cruise ship’s security staff. One message, sent to Harvey Salamone, Chomp’s chief of security, reads, ‘Kill him one of those quiet ways like in the godfather before they take the cannolis.’ ”

  Chomp and Harvey were gaping at the screen.

  “I found it,” I said.

  Chomp turned quickly from the screen, desperate for a distraction. “What?”

  “I found your phone. I took it from the yurt before the speech. My mom told me you left it behind to avoid distractions. She wanted to show off your island pleasure palace. It’s one thing to sleep with you, but to know where you stash your phone implies real intimacy. I slipped it into my pocket while she was redoing her makeup. Sorry, Mom.”

  “That’s all right,” my mother said.

  CNN was now solemnly displaying another piece of evidence, a photo taken of the outside of Clark Wolfson’s stateroom just before his murder. Two men were in the process of opening his door. Some graphic artist had drawn a virtual circle around the head of the taller one and labeled it “James Breatherd”—Jimbo. The anchor explained that the photographer was a passenger named Harold Smalls who apparently noted the suspicious activity, snapped the picture, and alerted ship security, leading to the investigation.