“Sooner or later you’ll find that you have to incorporate with the Confederacy,” Mr. Brodey, the stranger, was saying. The other faces around the big dining-room table were cool and reserved. “The kind of intervillage barter economy you’ve got up here just can’t hold up forever, you know, even though it’s really a kind of communal socialism—”
“Are you sayin’ we’re communists up heah?” Mr. Samuels said, outraged, but before Brodey could reply (if he intended to), Jamie strode to the table, pulled out an empty chair—his own habitual seat—and sat down. All faces turned to him, startled, and conversation stopped.
Jamie stared back at them. To walk to the table had taken the last of his will; things were closing down on him again, his vision was swimming, and he began to lose touch with his body, as if his mind were floating slowly up and away from it, like a balloon held by the thinnest sort of tether. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and he opened his mouth, panting like a dog. Through a sliding, shifting confusion, he heard Mrs. Hamlin start to say, “Jamie! I thought I told you—” at the same time that Mr. Ashley was saying to Mr. Brodey, “Don’t let him bother you none. He’s just the local half-wit. We’ll send him back to the kitchen,” and Brodey was smiling in tolerant, condescending amusement, and something about Brodey’s thin, contemptuous smile, something about the circle of staring faces, something wrenched words up out of Jamie, sending them suddenly flying out of his mouth. He hurled the familiar words out at the pale staring faces as he had so many times before, rattling their teeth with them, shaking them to their bones. He didn’t know what the words meant anymore, but they were the old strong words, the right words, and he heard his voice fill with iron. He spoke the words until there were no more words to speak, and then he stopped.
A deathly hush had fallen over the room. Mr. Brodey was staring at him, and Jamie saw his face run through a quick gamut of expressions: from irritation to startled speculation to dawning astonishment. Brodey’s jaw went slack, and he gasped—a little startled grunt, as if he had been punched in the stomach—and the color went swiftly out of his face. “My God!” he said. “Oh, my God!”
For Jamie, it was as if the world were draining away again, everything pulling back until he could just barely touch reality with his fingertips, and the room shimmered and buzzed as he struggled to hold on to even that much control. All the faces had gone blank, wiped clean of individuality, and he could no longer tell which of the featureless pink ovoids was the sweating, earnest, astounded face of Mr. Brodey. He got clumsily to his feet, driving his leaden body by an act of conscious will, as though it were some ill-made clockwork golem. He flailed his arms for balance, knocked his chair over with a clatter, and stood swaying before them, smelling the sour reek of his own sweat. “I’m sorry,” he blurted. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hamlin. I didn’t mean to—”
The silence went on a moment longer, and then, above the mounting waves of buzzing nausea and unreality, he heard Mrs. Hamlin say, “That’s all right, child. We know you didn’t mean any harm. Go on upstairs now, Jamie. Go on.” Her voice sounded dry and flat and tired.
Blindly, Jamie spun and stumbled for the stairs, all the inchoate demons of memory snapping at his heels like years.
###
Downstairs, Mr. Brodey was still saying, “Oh, my God!” He hardly noticed that the dinner party was being dissolved around him or that Mrs. Hamlin was hustling him out onto the porch “for a word in private.” When she finally had him alone out there, the cool evening breeze slapping at his face through the wire mesh of the enclosed porch, he shook himself out of his daze and turned slowly to face her where she stood hunched and patient in the dappled shadows. “It’s him,” he said, still more awe than accusation in his voice. “Son of a bitch. It really is him, isn’t it?”
“Who, Mr. Brodey?”
“Don’t play games with me,” Brodey said harshly. “I’ve seen the old pictures. The half-wit, he really was—”
“Is.”
“—the President of the United States.” Brodey stared at her. “He may be crazy, but not because he thinks he’s the President—he is the President. James W. McNaughton. He is McNaughton, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“My God! Think of it. The very last President.”
“The incumbent President,” Mrs. Hamlin said softly.
They stared at each other through the soft evening shadows.
“And it’s not a surprise to you, either, is it?” Anger was beginning to replace disbelief in Brodey’s voice. “You’ve known it all along, haven’t you? All of you have known. You all knew from the start that he was President McNaughton?”
“Yes.”
“My God!” Brodey said, giving an entirely new reading to the phrase, disgust and edgy anger instead of awe. He opened his mouth, closed it, and began turning red.
“He came here almost twenty years ago, Mr. Brodey,” Mrs. Hamlin said, speaking calmly, reminiscently. “Perhaps two months after the War. The Outriders found him collapsed in a field out by the edge of town. He was nearly dead. Don’t ask me how he got there. Maybe there was some sort of hidden bunker way back up there in the hills, maybe his plane crashed nearby, maybe he walked all the way up here from what’s left of Washington—I don’t know. Jamie himself doesn’t know. His memory was almost gone; shock, I guess, and exposure. All he remembered, basically, was that he was the President, and even that was dim and misty, like something you might remember out of a bad dream, the kind that fades away and comes back sometimes, late at night. And life’s been like a half-dream for him ever since, poor soul. He never did get quite right in the head again.”
“And you gave him shelter?” Brodey said, his voice becoming shrill with indignation. “You took him in? That butcher?”
“Watch your mouth, son. You’re speaking about the President.”
“Goddamn it, woman. Don’t you know—he caused the War?”
After a smothering moment of silence, Mrs. Hamlin said mildly, “That’s your opinion, Mr. Brodey, not mine.”
“How can you deny it? The ‘One Life’ Ultimatum? The ‘preventative strikes’ on Mexico and Panama? It was within hours of the raid on Monterrey that the bombs started falling.”
“He didn’t have any other choice! The Indonesians had pushed him—”
“That’s crap, and you know it!” Brodey was shouting now. “They taught us all about it down in Mohawk; they made damn sure we knew the name of the man who destroyed the world, you can bet on that! Christ, everybody knew then that he was unfit for office, just a bombastic backwoods senator on a hate crusade, a cracker-barrel war-monger. Everybody said that he’d cause the War if he got into the White House—and he did! By God, he did! That pathetic half-wit in there. He did it!”
Mrs. Hamlin sighed and folded her arms across her middle, hugging herself as if in pain. She seemed to grow smaller and older, more withered and gnarled. “I don’t know, son,” she said wearily, after a heavy pause. “Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong. Maybe he was wrong. I don’t know. All that seemed so important then. Now I can hardly remember what the issues were, what it was all about. It doesn’t seem to matter much anymore, somehow.”
“How can you say that?” Brodey wiped at his face—he was sweating profusely and looking very earnest now, bewilderment leaching away some of the anger. “How can you let that . . . that man . . . him—how can you let him live here, under your roof? How can you stand to let him live at all, let alone cook for him, do his washing. My God!”
“His memory was gone, Mr. Brodey. His mind was gone. Can you understand that? Old Doc Norton, rest his soul, spent months just trying to get Jamie to the point where he could walk around by himself without anybody to watch him too close. He had to be taught how to feed himself, how to dress himself, how to go to the bathroom—like a child. At first, there was some even right here in Northview that felt the way you do, Mr. Brodey, and there’s still some as can’t be comfortable around Jamie, but one by one they came t
o understand, and they made their peace with him. Whatever he was or wasn’t, he’s just like a little child now—sick, old, frightened child who doesn’t really understand what’s happening to him, most of the time. Mr. Brodey, you can’t hate a little child for something he can’t even remember he’s done.”
Brodey spun around, as though to stalk back into the house, and then spun violently back. “He should be dead!” Brodey shouted. His fists were clenched now, and the muscles in his neck were corded. “At the very least, he should be dead! Billions of lives on that man’s hands! Billions. And you, you people, you not only let him live, you make excuses for him! For him!” He stopped, groping for words to express the enormity of his outrage. “It’s like . . . like making excuses for the Devil himself!”
Mrs. Hamlin stirred and came forward, stepping out of the porch shadows and into the moonlight, drawing her shawl more tightly around her, as though against a chill, although the night was still mild. She stared eye to eye with Brodey for several moments, while the country silence gathered deeply around them, broken only by crickets and the hoarse sound of Brodey’s impassioned breathing. Then she said, “I thought I owed it to you, Mr. Brodey, to try to explain a few things. But I don’t know if I can. Things have changed enough by now, steadied down enough, that maybe you younger people find it hard to understand, but those of us who lived through the War, we all had to do things we didn’t want to do. Right there where you’re standing, Mr. Brodey, right here on this porch, I shot a marauder down, shot him dead with my husband’s old pistol, with Mr. Hamlin himself laying stiff in the parlor not ten feet away, taken by the Lumpy Plague. And I’ve done worse things than that, too, in my time. I reckon we all have, all the survivors. And just maybe it’s no different with that poor old man sitting in there.”
Brodey regained control of himself. His jaw was clenched, and the muscles around his mouth stood out in taut little bands, but his breathing had evened, and his face was tight and cold. He had banked his anger down into a smoldering, manageable flame, and now for the first time he seemed dangerous. Ignoring—or seeming to ignore—Mrs. Hamlin’s speech, he said conversationally, “Do you know that we curse by him down in Mohawk? His name is a curse to us. Can you understand that? We burn him in effigy on his birthday, in the town squares, and over the years it’s become quite a little ceremony. He must atone, Mrs. Hamlin. He must be made to pay for what he’s done. We don’t suffer monsters to live, down in Mohawk.”
“Ayuh,” Mrs. Hamlin said sourly, “you do a lot of damn fool, jackass things down there, don’t you?” Mrs. Hamlin tossed her head back, silver hair glinting in the silver light, and seemed to grow taller again. There was a hard light in her eyes now, and a hard new edge in her voice. “Atone, is it now, you jackass? As if you’re some big pious kind of churchman, some damn kind of saint, you red-faced, loud-mouthed man. You with your damn fool flag and damn fool Mohawk Confederacy. Well, let me tell you, mister, this isn’t any Mohawk Confederacy here, never has been, never will be: This is Northview, sovereign state of Vermont, United States of America. Do you hear me, mister? This here is the United States of America, and that poor fool in there—why, he’s the President of the United States of America, even if sometimes he can’t cut his meat up proper. Maybe he was a fool, maybe he was wrong long ago, maybe he’s crazy now, but he’s still the President.” Eyes snapping, she jabbed a finger at Brodey. “As long as this town stands, then there’s still an America, and that old man will be President as long as there are still Americans alive to serve him. We take care of our own, Mr. Brodey; we take care of our own.”
A shadow materialized at Brodey’s elbow and spoke with Seth’s voice. “Edna?”
Brodey turned his head to glance at Seth. When he turned back to face Mrs. Hamlin, there was a gun in her hand, a big, old-fashioned revolver that looked too huge for the small, blue-veined hand that held it.
“You can’t be serious,” Brodey whispered.
“You need any help, Edna?” the shadow said. “I brought some of the boys.”
“No, thank you, Seth.” The barrel of the revolver was as unwavering as her gaze. “There’s some things a person’s got to do for herself.”
Then she cocked the hammer back.
The President of the United States didn’t notice the shot. Alone in the small upstairs bathroom, he avoided the eyes of the tarnished reflection in the mirror and compulsively washed his hands.
AFTERWORD TO EXECUTIVE CLEMENCY
As I mentioned, I was once a member of the now-defunct Guilford Writers Workshop. This was a group of—at the time—Young Turks—oh God, can this really have been almost twenty years ago? Jesus!—who met pretty frequently for workshopping sessions throughout the early 70s, the sessions starting, at a guess, sometime in late 1970 and running through 1974. The Workshop was held at Jack (Jay) Haldeman’s rambling old house in the pretty Guilford section of Baltimore. Charter members included Jay, his brother Joe Haldeman, Jack Dann, George Alec Effinger, Ted White, and me, although writers such as Bob Thurston, Tom Monteleone, Jean Sullivan, William Nabors, Ev Leif, and others attended one session or another over the years.
At one Guilford—I think that it was in late 1973—Jay put an unfinished manuscript fragment into the workshop to be critiqued. Sardonically titled, for convenience’s sake, “One of Our President’s Brain Cells is Missing,” the fragment consisted of an early version of the opening scene of the present story, with a man who is referred to as the President of the United States waking up in the attic of an old boardinghouse, going downstairs to where the other boardinghouse residents are having breakfast, and humiliating himself by breaking into the conversation with an answer to a question that hadn’t really been asked, about how at one time New York City did indeed have a larger population than Augusta (although I think it was Albany in Jay’s draft). There the fragment ended.
After the fragment was workshopped, somewhat inconclusively (since the workshop process really doesn’t work that well with incomplete story fragments or chunks taken out of unfinished novels-in-progress), I got to talking to Jay about it. There was something about the atmosphere of the fragment that fascinated me, and brought up all sorts of questions. The bigger-than-New-York-City answer seemed to indicate that this was an After-the-Bomb scenario, but that didn’t quite fit with the shabby boardinghouse ambience, and if this was the President, why did everybody treat him like a half-witted servant? Did he just think he was the President? And so on. Jay said that he had no idea; he was completely stalled on the story, and had no idea where it was going. I continued to pester him with questions, and with suggestions about where I thought the story should go, and then Jay made a big mistake: he smiled affably at me and said, “Well, why don’t you finish the story, then? We can do it as a collaboration.” I agreed enthusiastically, and left Baltimore a couple of days later with the fragment tucked safely into my bag.
Time passed. A lot of time . . . during which Jay no doubt gave up all hope of ever hearing anything about his story again.
Then one day, sometime in late 1979 or early 1980, I was browsing through some old files, and happened to pick up the fragment again. I’d just finished working on “Touring,” and was feeling confident and full of creative energy for the first time in quite a while—I looked at the fragment again, and this time, I suddenly knew what to do with it. I’d been thinking about it all this time as being about a man who thinks that he’s the President of the United States, a poor soul with delusions of grandeur; all at once, I saw that the story ought to be about a poor soul in mean circumstances who really is the President of the United States, and, once I saw that, everything else fell instantly into place.
I sat down at once, on my back stoop, and began working on the story in longhand in a three-ring notebook, starting with the scene where Jamie goes out and sees the strange wagon in front of the Outriders’ station. In a couple of days, I’d finished the rest of the story, and then went back and worked on the opening scene, smoothing it
out so that it would be a better stylistic match with the rest of the text, fluffing it out some, and inserting a few more introspective passages for Jamie. I was interested to see that by the time I’d finished the story, the figure of the President, who had started out as a typical Liberal Bugbear—we’d both been thinking of him as a kind of gloating, mean-spirited caricature of Nixon, down on his luck at last—had become a pitiable, sympathetic character who even had a good deal of his own odd sort of dignity; stories often know what you should do with them, and insist that you do it, even when you don’t. So then I wrote to Jay and told him the glad news—I had indeed finished the story, and it had taken me only six years! Or maybe seven; I’d lost track. Boy, talk about cost efficiency! Wasn’t he lucky? I’d actually finished it before the Twentieth Century ran out.
The story sold to Omni, and remains one of my favorites.
Oh, yeah—I changed the title, too.
AFTERNOON AT SCHRAFFT’S
GARDNER DOZOIS, JACK DANN, & MICHAEL SWANWICK
The wizard sat alone at a table in Schrafft’s, eating a tuna sandwich on rye. He finished off the last bite of his sandwich, sat back, and licked a spot of mayonnaise off his thumb. There was an ozone crackle in the air, and his familiar, a large brindle cat, materialized in the chair opposite him.
The cat coldly eyed the wizard’s empty plate. “And where, may I ask, is my share?” he demanded.
The wizard coughed in embarrassment.
“You mean you didn’t even leave me a crumb, is that it?”
The wizard shrugged and looked uncomfortable. “There’s still a pickle left,” he suggested.
The cat was not mollified.
“Or some chips. Have some potato chips.”
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