Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  Uncle Sam emerged, looking pleased with himself, buttoning up his pantaloons. “I promised you a veritable day of havoc, my friend, and it ain’t over yet! Nosirree, hob, I know what I’m explanigatin’ about, there’ll be a hot tamale in the old town tonight, so you better get a grip on your braces, boy—when Jesus comes to claim us all, it’s gonna be no place for skonks and cookie pushers! We’re in for a turrible grumble and rumble and roar, a most strenuous and fearful concatenation of orful circumstances, so stay with the procession or you’ll never catch up!” Maybe the pissing had done him good, he seemed more relaxed and playful again. I felt hopeful. But then he poked his nose into my refrigerator and his face fell. Nothing in there, I knew, but an empty cottage-cheese carton and a bottle of moldy ketchup. “Damn it, you spread a wuss table even than that Yankee pinch-fart Coolidge—only thing I ever got outa him was his wife’s apple pie, which was like eatin’ raw shrapnel, but even that was more wholesome than—hullo! what’s this! Say, I ain’t smoked an Optimo since before the last Depression!” He sniffed it, peeled the cellophane, bit off the end. “Do you mind?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “But me no buts, son, you gotta learn to give a little!” he scolded, tucking the cigar in his cheek. “No, like I’m noratin’, this is no local matter up in Times Square tonight, are you listenin’? The whole pesky world’s in on this one, always has been. It is, and I shit you not, it is a irrepressible conflict betwixt opposin’ and endurin’ forces! Why, it’s said that when the very angels fell—now, this was a long time ago, son, before your time, even before Grant’s time—it’s said their fall was on accounta unnatural lust and the betrayal of ‘etarnal secrets which were presarved in Heaven.’ You see? Even then! And you know what them secrets were?” He fumbled behind his ear, took off his plug hat and searched the inside band, slapped at his pockets. He swept the stacks of paper off my desk, finally found buried there a lighter Pat had once given me on some anniversary. “Well, come on, boy, I asked you a question, don’t stand there dumb as a dead nigger in a mudhole! You know what the secrets them angels betrayed were?”

  “N-no, sir!” I replied with a start.

  “They taught men how to make weapons!” said Uncle Sam solemnly.

  “Ah…!”

  “Whereupon, God stretched forth his little finger…” He flicked the lighter importantly, but nothing happened. “What the hell…?” He thumbed it several times, but it wouldn’t light. I knew this would happen, it had never worked since she gave it to me. “Goddamn world’s goin’ to the dogs!” he muttered irritably, “it’s them poxtaked Japs, the shiftless cusses,” and he struck it like a match on the seat of his pants. “Right…stretched forth his little pinky, then, and them traitor angels was consumed…”—he drew the flame slowly toward the cigar—“by (puff! puff!)…”—glancing up as smoke began to curl out between his lips, tossing the lighter out the window: “… FIRE!” The cigar exploded in his face.

  I couldn’t breathe. I stared at him in disbelief. His eyes were bugged out and crossed over his nose with astonishment, his face tarred with soot, his white eyebrows bobbing like a minstrel comic’s, the peeled-back cigar butt still quivering in his puckered lips like a blackened daisy. I’ve lost it, I wept. I’ll never be President!

  “BY GOD!” he roared. The few papers left on my desk lifted and settled again, and Ike’s framed prayer crashed from the wall. “WHAT IN TARNATION IS GOIN’ ON HERE!?!”

  “I’m—I’m sorry!” I cried. “I didn’t—!”

  “OHH! DUMB BE PASSION’S STORMY RAGE, WHEN HE WHO MIGHT A LIGHTED UP AND LED HIS AGE, FALLS BACK IN NIGHT!” he bellowed—the chandelier splintered and crashed, and the refrigerator door blew open and fell off its hinges. He was in a truly awesome rage, his face puffy and almost ugly, like a choleric John Adams or Teddy Roosevelt, and now black as Rochester’s to boot. I was clutching my breast in absolute terror. It is not a pleasant picture to see a whole brilliant career destroyed before your eyes, I thought, tears streaming down my cheeks, especially when it is your own! My knees had turned to Jell-O—jelly, I mean—and my—

  Suddenly his index finger sprang forward and waggled in front of my nose—it was just like those new 3-D movies, he didn’t seem to move an inch, just flashed that pointing finger out at me—I jumped right out of my shoes, even the one with the lace in it, and fell back against the wall. “LISTEN TO ME, MISTER!” he thundered, cracking the mirror over the fireplace and pinning me back against the wall with a look that not even the worst of the Democrats or the most vicious of the Phantom’s blackhearted agents ever gave me. I felt the wall behind me tremble—or perhaps it was only my own terror. “YOU’VE GOT JUST SIX HOURS TO GET YOURSELF STRAIGHTENED OUT OR ELSE!”

  “Oh, please!” I gasped. He towered high above me—oh, he was a mighty and terrible sight to see! I knew just how those poor criminals must have felt when Grover Cleveland came to hang them! He hurled the shattered cigar past my left ear and out the window—it whined by like a falling mortar shell and something deep inside my head seemed to blast open. “I can explain—!”

  “FUCK EXPLAIN! THE NECESSITY OF BEIN’ READY INCREASES! LOOK TO IT!”

  “I—I was only trying to do what you—!”

  But he was gone. I was alone in my office. Terribly alone: Uncle Sam had always before left something behind when he departed, something like static, a kind of energy that I could take into myself and use until it ceased to hum, but not this time. The emptiness was so profound it was nearly a vacuum. He seemed even to have sucked the room’s gravity away with him: papers, the disturbed red drapes, fragments of the exploded cigar and splintered chandelier, all hovered without settling. I moved, afloat, in stocking feet, swimming through all my guilt and shame, to my chair and fell dully toward it. Debris hung about everywhere, mirroring the awful muddle in my head. Then, slowly, the gravity came back. The drapes sank, the papers fell, I crashed into the chair. I could hardly move. I felt depleted, threatened with insignificance, abandoned. My chin sank to my chest, and I stared, sick at heart, at my gaping fly. I hadn’t felt so miserable since Mom went away to Arizona. How could it have come to this? I’ve thrown it all away! All I’ve worked for since I was ten years old! The odor of gunpowder clung to my nostrils, faintly acrid, faintly sweet…like semen. A last rebuff.

  I blew my nose.

  I had to move on, I knew. I couldn’t stay here.

  Go forth, he’d said. Under the open sky. Times Square, he meant. With all the rest of the nation. I dreaded it, all those goddamn people…

  I swiveled about and dragged my shoes over with one foot. He probably won’t even let me sit up front. I was just another throttlebottom, after all, like all the rest. Here today, gone tomorrow. Miserably, I stuffed my foot back into the laced-up shoe, breaking down the back of the heel but not caring, pulled the other one on and strung it up with some yellow packing string from my wastebasket. I stared wetly out on the mad clutter, wondering: Why did Uncle Sam do this to me? Why was I always the whipping boy? Who turned him against me?

  I heaved myself up out of the chair, hauled on my jacket, and slumped out of my wrecked office, crunching splintered glass underfoot. Should change suits for tonight, but what did it matter? I found a safety pin in one of Rose’s drawers for my fly. Ah, poor Rose, what would she do now? I felt sorry for all my secretaries and assistants. I felt sorry for all the people who had voted for me. And for my poor little girls. I felt sorry for the whole country. It didn’t seem fair. I pricked my thumb on the safety pin and was almost pleased. I sucked my thumb and demanded to know: How much must I give? What more can he possibly want from me? I’ve done everything a man can be expected to do without groveling on his knees, I just can’t take any more! I have found that leaders are subject to all the human frailties: they lose their tempers, become depressed, experience the other symptoms of tension. Sometimes even strong men will cry. Like me: I was bawling my goddamn eyes out. Jettisoned! Sandbagged! It was all over! I’d suffered it
all: the unwanted child, the unwanted boyfriend, the unwanted husband, the unwanted lawyer, the unwanted Vice Presidential candidate, the unwanted Republican leader—and now the unwanted Incarnation!

  After a while, after I’d stopped crying, I thought: maybe it was just as well. After all, look how many of the poor misused bastards had been physically destroyed by the travail of transmutation: one Roosevelt had been brought to his knees, the other blinded, Grant and Cleveland had got their insides eaten out, they’d nearly all got shot at and some hadn’t made it through at all, while others—Jackson, for example, Coolidge—had been left a little batty when it was all over. I’d seen Hoover up close, and there was something in his eyes that worried me, too. So what the hell, I told myself, take it as it comes, don’t go off half-cocked. I was no quitter after all, I had to ride it out to the end, maybe when these executions were over, things would look different. I wiped my face on my sleeve, put on sunglasses to hide the red eyes—things were bad enough, I didn’t want those news shits to start calling me “the Weep” again. And what was the dress tonight? Homburgs probably, since they’d gone down so well before. I found mine finally on a wooden chair back of the hat stand near the secretaries’ coffee mess. It was covered with eraser dust and spilt coffee, and somebody had apparently sat on it. By now I expected as much. Brusquely, I popped it out with my fist, swatted it against my pantleg to beat the dust off, and left the office.

  It was a warm June day out, bright even with my sunglasses on—too comfortable really, seemed like there ought to be rain, thunder and lightning, high winds, on such a day as this. Was there a clue in the sunshine? No, there were no clues, no clues. On the short walk through the park to Union Station, I thought: there’s something peculiar about Uncle Sam. He’s our Superchief in the Age of Flux, and yet here he is, worrying about something beyond it all—call it consistency, the game plan, the script, what you will…he’s still hungering after some kind of shape to things, I thought. Or else he’s putting me on, not telling me everything….

  Up to my left, scattered groups of sullen demonstrators wandered around with placards that read THEY MUST NOT DIE! and FIRST VICTIMS OF AMERICAN FASCISM!, while past me on the right moved knots of cheerful young men whose signs said DEATH TO LEFT WINGERS! and HELP CLEAN THE SCUM-MUNISTS OUT OF OUR CITY! and HANG ‘EM AND SHIP THE BODIES TO RUSSIA C.O.D.! These latter were crudely lettered compared to the handsomely printed pro-Rosenberg signs, but at least they bespoke a genuine sentiment. The professionally manufactured pro-Rosenberg propaganda just reinforced the suspicion of conspiracy. I walked up the middle between them, where the children played, thinking: in a way, the Rosenbergs are lucky—at least they know what they have to do. It’s not knowing what to do that tears your insides out.

  As I neared the station, I saw I was not alone, there were a lot of people arriving with me. Cabs and buses were swinging up, pouring out passengers, and the streets were jammed with illegally parked cars. The whole city seemed to be emptying out, moving toward Times Square. I avoided people I knew, which was easier than usual for some reason. The sunglasses maybe. Or else the homburg—no one else had one. But then a limousine full of Washington Post reporters pulled up and unloaded—I ducked around the Columbus fountain, pretended to study the legend up on the west side of the station. It was about fire. And electricity…

  CARRIER OF LIGHT & POWER. DEVOURER OF TIME & SPACE. BEARER OF HUMAN SPEECH OVER LAND & SEA. GREATEST SERVANT OF MAN.

  ITSELF UNKNOWN.

  …….

  THOU HAST PUT ALL THINGS UNDER HIS FEET

  What was one to do with such gratuitous messages? Nothing. The world was full of them. Union Station itself was a veritable Bartlett’s in stone. THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE, it said elsewhere. THE DESERT SHALL REJOICE AND BLOSSOM AS THE ROSE. Forget it. Like RID THE U.S. OF RATS! and SAVE THE ROSENBERGS FROM MCCARTHYISM! If you took such things seriously you were lost.

  I waited until the Post reporters had disappeared through the arches, then ducked my head and bulled my way through the crowd into Union Station. It was packed in there with people trying to make connections, get seats, bribe reporters. Lots of extra trains running to New York, so most would eventually make it, but there was a nervous, almost desperate feeling in the air—as though this were something one dared not miss, not merely because one had to be up there to say he’d lived through his own age, but more than that: because Times Square might be the only safe place in the world tonight! Well, I shared their anxiety, but I wasn’t afraid. Right now, the Bomb seemed like a happy entertainment, compared to what I was going through. I followed the signs for the Look Ahead, Neighbor Special, flashed my identification at the military barrier, received a salute, and was let through—though not without a suspicious double take at my disheveled state. I worried I might run into somebody like General Persons or Sherm Adams, but I was lucky: there was another run of this train later on, and apparently all the real bigwigs were going on that one. Nothing but second-stringers on this one, shit, I was demeaning myself again. I did pass Jack Kennedy, standing there on the platform with a leggy brunette—where did he get these broads? It wasn’t just his so-called Irish charm, I was as Irish as he was. His money probably. God knows that sonuvabitch would never get accused of a secret fund—his old man was all the funds he’d ever need, and it was no secret. His girlfriend was apparently going to take pictures of the executions. She looked familiar. A little like one of those female reporters who used to hang around outside the Senate toilet in the President’s Room. Maybe she’d bagged Kennedy out there. They were surrounded by a group of people, all smiling and radiant, and as I ducked by and slipped into the nearest open car, I heard Kennedy laugh lightly and remark: “Well, just let me say this about socialism, as Uncle Sam said once—ahh—said to me: At least it’s better than the goddamn Phantom!”

  This was disturbing. Not the part about the Phantom, but the part about Uncle Sam. Kennedy, I knew, was a skeptic, a freethinker, didn’t even believe in Uncle Sam, much less have congress with him—he’d told me so on a long trainride together six years ago. He’d laughed cynically then at my simpleminded fundamentalism and called me a gullible Hollywood primitive. And now—! Well, it was clearly worse than I’d supposed—and Kennedy might not be the only one. It occurred to me that a lot of guys had been showing newfound flash of late—my fair-haired-boy days with Sam Slick were over. But Kennedy? What was happening to Uncle Sam? Maybe we needed to revive the Know-Nothings and the American Protective Association, put a stop to the contamination, I thought sourly. Close the door, fuck the oppressed of every nation, get the Old Man back in the pink again. Distantly, I heard something about “the OPA.” Kennedy laughed. The girl tittered. The sonuvabitch. I hoped at least he sat in a different car this time.

  That other time was in the spring of 1947, we were both fresh out of our Naval Officer uniforms (I outranked him) and newly elected to the House of Representatives, both on the same Education and Labor committee, and Frank Buchanan had invited the two of us up to McKees-port, outside Pittsburgh, to debate the merits of what was then the hot issue in Congress, the Taft-Hartley Act. I was for the bill. Kennedy was against it. I won. Kennedy was a pushover in fact. Of course, the entire audience was made up of employers, I couldn’t help but win, but I could have beat him anywhere. Maybe this had pissed Kennedy off and made him unusually sarcastic. After the meeting, we’d ridden a sleeper from Pittsburgh back to the capital. During the long rocky ride, we’d talked about foreign affairs, the handling of the Communist threat at home and abroad, and religion: where America was going, what it all meant. I didn’t recall the details—except that he kept wanting to talk about getting ass and at one point, when I tried quoting Alf Landon on the “new frontier,” complained that I had the imagination of a fucking peasant—but of one thing I was absolutely certain: Only I had the true faith. Not that I’d had any concrete proof yet myself, I’d had as much contact with Uncle Sam as I’d had with Jesus, but as usual, my instincts were ri
ght about this and Kennedy’s were wrong.

  At the time, I’d thought: it’s probably his Catholicism standing in the way. But he didn’t seem to be much of a Catholic either—not like Charlie Kersten, for example, who was on the committee with us, or Monsignor Sheen or my friend Father Cronin—hell, in a way, I was more of a Catholic than he was! I eventually realized it was mainly his money and good looks that had agnosticized him: he didn’t have to fight for anything, didn’t have to ask hard questions. Probably got a soft push downhill at Harvard, too. The only reason he’d beat Lodge out of his Senate seat was because his old man had bought off the pro-Lodge Boston Post with half a million dollars. At the time I’d seen this as yet another stroke of historical luck for me, getting rid of Lodge like that, but now I couldn’t be sure. Uncle Sam had a lot of respect for money, I knew that—hadn’t he just lectured me on it? But Kennedy was too frivolous, too cocky, a pampered arrogant snot who wasn’t interested in anything unless he could get into its pants—he wasn’t called “Shafty” in the Navy for nothing—and if my butt was made of iron, his was made of peanut brittle. Like my brother Harold, he had a certain reckless charm, but no discipline, no staying power. I’d never taken him seriously, and assumed Uncle Sam hadn’t either—Uncle Sam was born an Episcopalian, ate a whole side of cornfed Nebraska beef every Friday night and would rather whip a papist paddywhack than a nigger any day. Negro, I mean. Not a single one of his Presidential Incarnations had even mentioned Jesus by name in an Inaugural Address, much less his R.C.-idolatrized Mother. The only occasion I’d ever heard Uncle Sam mention the Virgin was the night he’d interrupted my Caribbean cruise back in 1948—just the second time I’d ever seen Uncle Sam that close—to fly me back to Whittaker Chambers’s pumpkin patch. He still didn’t know me well then, and, while working the rowing machine in the S.S. Panama’s gym, which we’d snuck away to, he’d asked me a little about my life. I’d begun at the beginning, as I always do, with the day of my birth, but he’d interrupted to ask me when I’d lost my cherry. I’d stammered something clumsy about honeymooning with Pat in Mexico, and he’d laughed that rattling disconcerting peddler’s laugh of his and, keeping rhythm with his strokes, had chanted: