Public Burning
Page 68
“Nice, my foot! The world is rough, Grandmother, and when they hit you, you have to hit them back, and the best way to do that is to hit them before they hit you! I don’t apologize for that—I’m a political animal, Grandmother, and—”
“Yes, and you smell like one, too,” she’d sniffed. “You’ve lost your Quaker spirit, Richard.”
“Only on domestic issues, Grandmother! I’m still a Quaker on foreign issues!”
“Drinking, smoking, swearing, cheating, telling untruths and tricking people—tsk tsk! You never talk about God or Jesus any more, Richard—and you play cards and take money from people—”
“Not for myself!” I’d insisted. “I don’t take anything for myself!”
“And all those paragraphs about you in the college yearbooks—you wrote them yourself!”
“Not—not my senior year, I didn’t, Grandmother!”
“‘Great things are expected…’ My my! You should be ashamed, Richard!”
“Well, you…you have to be conceited in this business…”
“And what did you do up in that bell tower all by yourself? You know, Richard, your mother and father used to wonder if perhaps you weren’t a bit disturbed. You were a very strange boy. I used to defend you, just as I defended all the boys, but…”
“I… I like to go my own way, Grandmother, keep my own counsel. That’s the way I am, and one thing I always have to be—”
“You used to peck up the hired girls’ skirts. You even tried to peek up my skirts!”
“I…did—?!”
“And you harbored wicked thoughts about little Ola and Marjorie and those burlesque dancers you used to go see with your cousin—”
“That was a long time ago, Grandmother, before I was married. I—”
“Oh yes? What about that secretary at the OPA, that nurse out in the Pacific Ocean—”
“I… I was lonely—”
“And this afternoon? Were you lonely this afternoon?”
“Wha—?! How…how did you—?”
“‘Oh, Ethel! I’d do anything for you!’ Shame, shame, Richard! No wonder they’ve been punishing you!”
“I… I was just pretending! It’s true! I’d gone up there to—Grandmother! Why are you writing all this down?”
“Ah…the, uh, better to counsel you with, my dear,” she’d replied with a faint tight-lipped smile.
It was about this time that I’d begun to recall all those notes to myself about letting down too soon after crisis. For one thing, my Grandmother Milhous was dead, had been for years. For another, there hadn’t been any secretary at the OPA, that had just been—and then it had come to me, like the punch line of an old joke heard a thousand times over, who it was: “Edgar! You!”
“You know, Dick,” he’d smiled, chucking me under the chin, “the reason you’ve never been any good at making out is that you talk too much about yourself!”
“Goddamn you, Edgar!” I’d stormed, slapping his hand away. “It’s been you all along!”
There were noises out in the Square now and crowds of hostile people were being shoved toward us into the Whale. “Come on, Dick,” Hoover had said, smoothing down his heavy skirts, “I’d better get you out of here before the choice between the quick and the dead goes the wrong way for you….”
Ah, why should an honest man enter public life and submit himself and his family to this kind of thing? Of course, a man who goes voluntarily into the political arena must expect some wounds in the battles in which he engages, but it seemed to me I suffered more than I deserved to. Both Pat and I had perhaps what one might describe as an overdeveloped sense of privacy. I know, people in political life have to live in a fishbowl. Every public figure, whose most important asset is his reputation, is at the mercy of the smear artists and the rumormongers, that’s politics, but no matter how often you tell yourself that “this is part of the battle,” or that “an attack is a compliment because your adversaries never bother taking on someone who amounts to nothing,” there are times when you wonder if you shouldn’t chuck the whole business.
Ethel’s aria had faded and in its place, somewhere in the distance, far beyond the bedroom window, I seemed to hear somebody whistling, and what they were whistling was: “Happy Days Are Here Again!” My song! Oh my God! I knew who it was—was he coming here? I shrank back, panting wheezily, my heart in my throat, tears springing to my eyes. I felt like I used to feel whenever I’d hear my old man approaching in a rage, clutching his razor strap. Even if it wasn’t for me. Things would sort of light up and get reddish all around me, inside as well as out, and that was what happened now. I squeezed my eyes shut: oh shit, hadn’t I suffered enough? And when I opened them again, sure enough, there he was: standing in front of me near the fluttering curtains, his eyes glittering with animal menace, a cold sneer on his lips, the pallid gray light falling through the open window on his goateed face making him look suddenly old and ugly.
“Come here, boy,” he said, smiling frostily and jabbing his recruitment finger at me with one hand, unbuttoning his striped pantaloons with the other: “I want YOU!”
“But—!”
“Speech me no speeches, my friend, I had a bcllyfulla baloney—what I got a burnin’ yearnin’ for now is a little humble toil, heavenward duty, and onmittygated cornholin’ whoopee! So jes’ drap your drawers and bend over, boy—you been ee-LECK-ted”
“Wha—?!”
“You heerd me!” he roared. “E pluribus the ole anum, buster, and on the double!” He dragged me backwards into the light, whipped my pants down, gave my ass a cracking caress: “Ah, an old old sight, you scamp, and yet somehow so young—aye, and not changed a wink since first I seen it! Bless me, you look purtier’n a tree frog on a fence rail with the wind up!”
“Please!” I whimpered. “I can’t—!”
“I’ll help you,” he whispered girlishly, tickling my rectum. “Come on, loosen up, Nick! unlock the ole Snack Shack and impart to me summa your noble spirit, like, eh, like the lady says…”
But I scrambled out of his grip while he was fumbling with his braces, bounded back into the blankets and dog biscuits. “My God, you’ve—gasp!—just killed her!” I cried, cowering in a dark corner. “How can you make fun of her like that, she’s not even cold yet—!”
“Cause I’se wicked, I is,” he replied with a wolfish grin, flashing his incisors. The air seemed thick with a heavy doggy stink, but I didn’t know if it came from him, me, or Checkers’s gear. “I’se mighty wicked, anyhow, I can’t help it—she’s part a me now, both her and her brave engineer, just as much as Pocahontas, Billy the Kid, or Bambi—”
“You didn’t have to kill them! You just did it for fun! You’re a…a butcher! a beast! You’re no better than the Phantom!”
“Aw fidgety fudge, them two raskils was lucky—”
“Lucky!”
“Sure! It ain’t easy holdin’ a community together, order ain’t what comes natural, you know that, boy, and a lotta people gotta get killt tryin’ to pretend it is, that’s how the game is played—but not many of ’em gets a chance to have it done to ’em onstage in Times Square!”
I knew that what he was telling me was the truth—but what about the way I felt? He wasn’t telling me everything, I thought…. “All they wanted was what you promised them, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration—”
“Bah! The wild oats of youth! Listen, bein’ young and rearin’ up agin the old folks makes you fotch up a lotta hootin’ and hollerin’ you live to regret—puritanism! whoo, worse’n acne! It’s great for stirrin’ up the jism when you’re nation-breedin’, but it ain’t no way to live a life!”
“You’ve…you’ve changed,” I said, my voice shaking. “You’re not the same as when I was a boy!”
He laughed softly and reached into the darkness to snatch me by the nape in his viselike grip. “You’re forty years old, son: time you was weaned!”
“No!” I begged. “Please—!”
“You wanta make
it with me,” he panted, dragging me brutally out of the shadows and spinning me around, “you gotta love me like I really am: Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler, gun-totin’ hustler and tooth-’n’-claw tamer of the heathen wilderness, lusty and in everthing a screamin’ meddler, novus ball-bustin’ ordo seclorum, that’s me, boy—and goodnight Mrs. Calabash to any damfool what gets in my way!” He licked his finger.
“But you…you can’t—!”
“Can and will, my beauty, can and will! You said it yourself: they’s a political axiom that wheresomever a vacuum exists, it will be filled by the nearest or strongest power! Well, you’re lookin’ at it, mister: an example and fit instrument, big as they come in this world and gittin’ bigger by the minute! Towerin’ genius disdains a beaten path—it seeks regions hitherto unexplored—so clutch aholt on somethin’ and say your prayers, cuz I propose to move immeejitly upon your works!”
“No!” I cried. “Stop!” But too late, he was already lodged deep in my rectum and ramming it in deeper—oh Christ! it felt like he was trying to shove the whole goddamn Washington Monument up my ass! “For God’s sake!” I screamed. “You’re tearing me apart!”
“No gains without—grunt!—pains, son,” he replied coldly, forcing his way in inch by inch—or was it yard by yard? Why had I ever doubted him? “You hanker for the fast track, the—mmf!—dust of the arena, the big leagues—well, these things are what you—uff! ah!—pay!”
“I take it back!”
He didn’t even seem to hear me. “Maybe, as our Early Warning Sentinels have put it, some healthy tissue will have to—pant!—have to be destroyed—but what the hell, rondyvoos with destiny ain’t beanbag!”
“I don’t want to!” I wailed in agony, twisting and pitching about. “I quit!”
“Jehu Nimshi!” he bellowed. “If you ain’t the all-starten skittiest crittur in all Hail Columbia! I’m bewarin’ you, Throttlebottom: I propose to—fah!—fight it out on this yere line, if it takes all summer! Why are you nervous?”
“Oh my God!” I wept.
“Ain’t you always said: when a man’s—ugh!—constrained or—huff!—arty-fishal, he don’t get through, so be not a—coo!—a-quail neither awestrucken! Thar ain’t nothin’ to fear but fear itself and a dry hole! Opportunity—ungff!—is a-knockin’, boy, but if you’re gonna stay all stobbed up, then by hokey I say—grunt!—let’s call for a hatchet!”
“No!” I shrieked, giving way. And in he came, filling me with a ripping all-rupturing force so fierce I thought I’d die! This…this is not happening to me alone, I thought desperately, or tried to think, as he pounded deeper and deeper, destroying everything, even my senses, my consciousness—but to the nation as well!
“Whoop! clean as a hound’s tooth!” he enthused. “Hoo hah! I do believe our form of guvvament, be it ever so humble, is deeply—oof! ah!—imbedded in ole Slippery Gulch at last! a miracle of fit and flattery! Yow! Fooff!”
Jesus, he was killing me! I’d been right about it all along! It was my execution! I was utterly gorged by him, he was slamming away in my belly, my chest, my very skull! I couldn’t even breathe! I thought my heart would burst, my eyeballs would pop out! I was screaming and howling horribly but nobody came to my rescue.
“Now—puff!—don’t be a baby, baby!” Uncle Sam crooned softly, leaning down to blow in my ear. He seemed to be wrapping me round, pressing his flesh against mine, inside and out—I felt like a tissue of pure pain, lodged like a condom between two grinding surfaces.… “I know, it—grunt!—always hurts the first time—hoo!—gettin’ exposed like this to a crool invasion from—pant!—without and convulsions within, but bear up: heaven holds all for which you—whuff!—sigh—so there, little boy, don’t—don’t cry!” He was breathing heavily now, whamming away like a steam engine—I felt like I was being blown up like a balloon. “We’re gonna do—phew!—great things together, we’re—nngh!—doin’ great things together right now—we—yow!—look out, son, my—gasp!—my cup—oh! ah!—runneth over—!”
My insides were rent suddenly with a powerful explosion, sending me skidding on my face several feet across the floor, and there was a terrific inundation! I seemed to be leaking at all pores and orifices—I couldn’t even scream! Uncle Sam let out a fearsome groan and seemed to fall away—yet he remained inside me, throbbing and exploding. I lay there on the spare-room floor, gurgling, sweating, half-senseless, bruised and swollen and stuffed like a sausage, thinking: Well, I’ve been through the fire. After this, very few, if any, difficult situations could seem insurmountable if anything personal is involved. Nothing could match this. Nothing could top it. Not without being fatal.
Finally, when I felt able to speak, I lifted my head and asked feebly: “Please…! When…when are you going to…to get out?” But I saw then that he was out. He was buttoning up his striped pantaloons, which were now stained with the lipstick off my ass. Or maybe this time it was blood. I fell back, curled up around my pain. Oh my God, so this was what it was like! I felt like a woman in hard labor, bloated, sewn up, stuffed with some enormous bag of gas I couldn’t release. I recalled Hoover’s glazed stare, Roosevelt’s anguished tics, Ike’s silly smile: I should have guessed….
“Well, this is the end of a perfect day,” Uncle Sam was saying. He seemed radiant, aglow, almost as though lit from within. His smile was gentle now, and there was a merry twinkle in his blue eyes. “Tell me, son, speakin’ theorectally,” he asked with a wink as he reknotted his string tie, “how did you love our little…afterclap?”
“I feel sick,” I groaned.
“Ha ha, you’re not sick, you’re just in love,” he grinned and leaned down to kiss my cheek. “Hey, you’re the one, you know!” he whispered, or seemed to whisper—it was strange his voice: almost as though he were no longer speaking aloud. His words seemed to fall silently from his lips, curl in silence down the channels of my ears, blossoming finally in a kind of audible puff against my inner ear like flowers, like seed pods.… “I mean it, Gus! You’re my handsome carny barker, my wild Irish rocker-socker, my fellow travelin’ salesman, my little accident, my pretty sailorboy!” He patted my bum affectionately. “You’re my everything, sunshine—you’re my boy!”
His words warmed me and chilled me at the same time. Maybe the worst thing that can happen to you in this world is to get what you think you want. And how did we know what we wanted? It was a scary question and I let it leak away, unanswered. Of course, he was an incorrigible huckster, a sweet-talking con artist, you couldn’t trust him, I knew that—but what did it matter? Whatever else he was, he was beautiful (how had I ever thought him ugly?), the most beautiful thing in all the world. I was ready at last to do what I had never done before. “I… I love you, Uncle Sam!” I confessed.
But he was already gone, I was alone. Only the last of his words remained, bursting tenderly now against my inner ear, as I lay there, eyes watering up and chest heaving, in the lonesome darkness…“Well, something attempted, something done, my boy, has earned a night’s repose, so let the tent be struck. I leave off as I began. Vaya con Dios, my darklin’, and remember: vote early and vote often, don’t take any wooden nickels, and”—by now I was rolling about helplessly on the spare-room floor, scrunched up around my throbbing pain and bawling like a baby—“always leave ’em laughin’ as you say good-bye!”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation for grants which were of great help in writing this book.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Fred Rose Music, Inc.: From “Hey, Good Lookin’” by Hank Williams, Copyright © 1951 Fred Rose Music, Inc.; all rights reserved. From “Ramblin’ Man” by Hank Williams, Copyright © 1951 Fred Rose Music, Inc.; all rights reserved. Both used by permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1976, 1977 by Robert Coover
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9619-6
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