An Agent of Utopia

by Andy Duncan

  FORT WAYNE, 1912—WORKING THE BAG—KO’d J. Young in 6th on May 23 (Go JESS!)

  The captions were yellowed and brittle now, tended to flutter out in bits like confetti when the albums were opened too roughly.

  “I’m a good typist, Jess,” Jennifer said. “I could make you some new ones.”

  “No, thanks,” Jess said. “I like these fine.”

  “Where’s the Johnson book?”

  “Hold your horses, it’s right here. There you go. I knew you’d want that one.”

  Jennifer was less interested in Jack Johnson per se than in the fact that one of Hattie’s scrapbooks was devoted to one of her husband’s most famous opponents, a man whom Jess had beaten for the title, and never met again. Jennifer suspected this scrapbook alone was as much the work of Jess as of Hattie—and the aging Jess at that, since it began with Johnson’s obituaries in 1946. Hence the appeal of the Johnson scrapbook; this mysterious and aging Jess, after all, was the only one she knew. The last third of the book had no typewritten captions, and clippings that were crooked beneath their plastic. The last few pages were blank. Stuck into the back were a few torn-out and clumsily folded newspaper clippings about Muhammad Ali.

  “Johnson was cool,” she said, turning the brittle pages with care. “It is so cool that you got to fight him, Jess. And that you won! You must have been proud.”

  “I was proud,” Willard said, reaching for another pillow to slide beneath his bony buttocks. “Still am,” he added. “But I wish I had known him, too. He was an interesting man.”

  “He died in a car wreck, didn’t he?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s so sad.” Jennifer knew about the car wreck, of course; it was all over the front of the scrapbook. She was just stalling, making noise with her mouth, while pondering whether now was the time to get Jess talking about Johnson’s three wives, all of them white women, all of them blonde white women. Jennifer was very interested to know Jess’s thoughts about that.

  “You fought him in Havana because, what? You weren’t allowed to fight in the United States, or something?” She asked this with great casualness, knowing Johnson was a fugitive from U.S. justice at the time, convicted of violating the Mann Act, i.e., transporting women across state lines for “immoral purposes,” i.e., white slavery, i.e., sex with a white woman.

  “Yeah, something like that,” Jess said. He examined the ragged hem of his sweater, obviously uninclined to pursue the conversation further. God, getting an 87-year-old man to talk about sex was hard.

  “I was trying to tell Carl about it, but I, uh, forgot the uh, details.” She kept talking, inanely, flushed with horror. Massive slip-up. She never had mentioned Carl in front of Jess before, certainly not by name. Carl was three years older than she was, and worse yet, a dropout. He was also black. Not Negro, he politely insisted: black. He wanted to meet Jess, and Jennifer wanted that to happen, too—but she would have to careful about how she brought it up. Not this way! Sure, Jess might admire Jack Johnson as a fighter, but would he want his teenage great-granddaughter to date him?

  “There was some rule against it, I think,” Jess said, oblivious, and she closed her eyes for a second in relief. “I be doggoned but this sweater wasn’t worth bringing home from the store.” He glanced up. “You didn’t give me this sweater, did you, Sprout?”

  “No, Jess,” Jennifer said. She closed the Johnson scrapbook, elated to avoid that conversation one more day.

  “I wouldn’t hurt you for nothing, you know,” Jess said. “Wouldn’t let no one else hurt you, neither.”

  She grinned, charmed. “Would you stand up for me, Jess?”

  “I sure would, baby. Anybody bothers you, I’ll clean his clock.” He slowly punched the air with mottled fists, his eyes huge and swimming behind his glasses, and grinned a denture-taut grin. On impulse, Jennifer kissed his forehead. Resettling herself on the floor, she opened one of the safer scrapbooks. Here was her favorite photo of Jess at the produce market, hair gray beneath his paper hat. He held up to the light a Grade A white egg that he smiled at in satisfaction. Grandma Hattie had typed beneath the photo: TWO GOOD EGGS.

  “One hundred and thirteen fights,” Jess said. Something in his voice made Jennifer glance up. He looked suddenly morose, gazing at nothing, and Jennifer worried that she had said something to upset him; he was so moody, sometimes. “That’s how many Johnson fought. More than Tunney, more than Louis. Twice as many as Marciano. Four times as many as Jeffries, as Fitzsimmons, as Gentleman Jim Corbett. And forty-four of them knockouts.” He sighed and repeated, almost inaudibly, “Forty-four.”

  She cleared her throat, determined, and said loudly: “Hey, you want to write another letter?” About once a month, Jess dictated to her a letter to the editor, saying Ali was the champ fair and square whether people liked it or not, same as Jack Johnson had been, same as Jess Willard had been, and if people didn’t like it then let them take Ali on in the ring like men. The Times had stopped printing the letters after the third one, but she hadn’t told Jess that.

  He didn’t seem to have heard her. After a few seconds, though, his face brightened. “Hey,” he said. “Did I ever tell you about the time I got the chance to walk through a wall?”

  Relieved, she screwed up her face in mock concentration. “Well, let’s see, about a hundred million billion times, but you can tell me again if you want. Do you ever wish you’d done it?”

  “Nah,” Jess said, leaning into the scrapbook to peer at the two good eggs. “I probably misunderstood him in the first place. He never let anybody else get in on the act, that I heard of. He was too big a star for that.” He sat back, settled into the armchair with a sigh. “I must have misunderstood him. Anyway.” He was quiet again, but smiling. “Too late now, huh?”

  “I guess so,” Jennifer said, slowly turning the pages, absently stroking her beads so that the strands clicked together. Beside her Jess began, gently, to snore. She suppressed a laugh: Could you believe it? Just like that, down for the count. Without realizing it, she had turned to a clipping from the Times, dated December 1, 1915.

  TWO CHAMPIONS MEET

  RING ARTIST, ESCAPE ARTIST SHAKE ON

  ORPHEUM STAGE

  Young Jess looked pretty spiffy in his evening wear, Jennifer thought. Spiffy, she knew from reading the scrapbooks, had been one of Grandma Hattie’s favorite words. Jess was crouched to fit into the photograph, which must have been taken from the front row. The two men looked down at the camera; at their feet a couple of footlights were visible. At the bottom edge of the photo was the blurred top of a man’s head. Someone had penciled a shaky arrow from this blur and written, “Lou.” The background was murky, but Jennifer could imagine a vaulted plaster ceiling, a chandelier, a curtain embroidered with intricate Oriental designs. Beneath the clipping, Grandma Hattie had typed: JESS MEETS EHRICH WEISS a.k.a. HARRY HOUDINI (1874-1926). On the facing page, Houdini’s faded signature staggered across a theater program.

  Even as a kid, Jennifer had been intrigued by Houdini’s eyes. Although the clipping was yellowed and the photo blurred to begin with, Houdini always seemed to look right at her, into her. It was the same in the other photos, in the Houdini books she kept checking out of the library. He wasn’t Jennifer’s type, but he had great eyes.

  As she looked at the clipping, she began to daydream. She was on stage, wearing a tuxedo and a top hat and tights cut up to there, and she pulled back a screen to reveal—who? Hmm. She wasn’t sure. Maybe Carl; maybe not. Daydreaming was a sign, said the goateed guy who taught her comp class, of sensitivity, of creativity. Yeah, right. Sometimes when she was home alone—she told no one this—she put on gym shorts and went out back and boxed the air, for an hour or more at a time, until she was completely out of breath. Why, she couldn’t say. Being a pacifist, she couldn’t imagine hitting a person, no, but she sure beat hell out of the air. She really wanted to be n
either a boxer nor a magician. She was a political-science major, and had her heart set on the Peace Corps. And yet, when Carl had walked into the coffeehouse that night alone, fidgeting in the doorway with an out-of-place look, considering, maybe, ducking back outside again, what did she say to him? She walked right up to Carl, bold as brass (that was another of Grandma Hattie’s, BOLD as BRASS), stuck out her chin and stuck out her hand and said, “Hi, my name is Jennifer Schumacher, and I’m the great-granddaughter of the ex-heavyweight champion of the world.” Carl shook her hand and looked solemn and said, “Ali?” and people stared at them, they laughed so hard, and if I ever get a chance to walk through a wall, she vowed to herself as she closed the scrapbook, I’m taking it—so there.

  Senator Bilbo

  “It regrettably has become necessary for us now, my friends, to consider seriously and to discuss openly the most pressing question facing our homeland since the War. By that I mean, of course, the race question.”

  In the hour before dawn, the galleries were empty, and the floor of the Shire-moot was nearly so. Scattered about the chamber, a dozen or so of the Senator’s allies—a few more than needed to maintain the quorum, just to be safe—lounged at their writing-desks, feet up, fingers laced, pipes stuffed with the best Bywater leaf, picnic baskets within reach: veterans, all. Only young Appledore from Bridge Inn was snoring and slowly folding in on himself; the chestnut curls atop his head nearly met those atop his feet. The Senator jotted down Appledore’s name without pause. He could get a lot of work done while making speeches—even a filibuster nine hours long (and counting).

  “There are forces at work today, my friends, without and within our homeland, that are attempting to destroy all boundaries between our proud, noble race and all the mule-gnawing, cave-squatting, light-shunning, pit-spawned scum of the East.”

  The Senator’s voice cracked on “East,” so he turned aside for a quaff from his (purely medicinal) pocket flask. His allies did not miss their cue. “Hear, hear,” they rumbled, thumping the desktops with their calloused heels. “Hear, hear.”

  “This latest proposal,” the Senator continued, “this so-called immigration bill—which, as I have said, would force even our innocent daughters to suffer the reeking lusts of all the ditch-bred legions of darkness—why, this baldfooted attempt originated where, my friends?”

  “Buckland!” came the dutiful cry.

  “Why, with the delegation from Buckland . . . long known to us all as a hotbed of book-mongers, one-Earthers, elvish sympathizers, and other off-brands of the halfling race.”

  This last was for the benefit of the newly arrived Fredegar Bracegirdle, the unusually portly junior member of the Buckland delegation. He huffed his way down the aisle, having drawn the short straw in the hourly backroom ritual.

  “Will the distinguished Senator,” Bracegirdle managed to squeak out, before succumbing to a coughing fit. He waved his bladder-like hands in a futile attempt to disperse the thick purplish clouds that hung in the chamber like the vapors of the Eastmarsh. Since a Buckland-sponsored bill to ban tobacco from the floor had been defeated by the Senator three Shire-moots previous, his allies’ pipe-smoking had been indefatigable. Finally Bracegirdle sputtered: “Will the distinguished Senator from the Hill kindly yield the floor?”

  In response, the Senator lowered his spectacles and looked across the chamber to the Thain of the Shire, who recited around his tomato sandwich: “Does the distinguished Senator from the Hill so yield?”

  “I do not,” the Senator replied, cordially.

  “The request is denied, and the distinguished Senator from the Hill retains the floor,” recited the Thain of the Shire, who then took another hearty bite of his sandwich. The Senator’s party had re-written the rules of order, making this recitation the storied Thain’s only remaining duty.

  “Oh, hell and hogsheads,” Bracegirdle muttered, already trundling back up the aisle. As he passed Gorhendad Bolger from the Brockenborings, that Senator’s man like his father before him kindly offered Bracegirdle a pickle, which Bracegirdle accepted with ill grace.

  “Now that the distinguished gentleman from the Misty Mountains has been heard from,” the Senator said, waiting for the laugh, “let me turn now to the evidence—the overwhelming evidence, my friends—that many of the orkish persuasion currently living among us have been, in fact, active agents of the Dark Lord . . .”

  As the Senator plowed on, seldom referring to his notes, inventing statistics and other facts as needed, secure that this immigration bill, like so many bills before it, would wither and die once the Bucklanders’ patience was exhausted, his self-confidence faltered only once, unnoticed by anyone else in the chamber. A half-hour into his denunciation of the orkish threat, the Senator noticed a movement—no, more a shift of light, a glimmer—in the corner of his eye. He instinctively turned his head toward the source, and saw, or thought he saw, sitting in the farthest, darkest corner of the otherwise empty gallery, a man-sized figure in a cloak and pointed hat, who held what must have been (could have been) a staff; but in the next blink, that corner held only shadows, and the Senator dismissed the whatever-it-was as a fancy born of exhilaration and weariness. Yet he was left with a lingering chill, as if (so his old mother, a Took, used to say) a dragon had hovered over his grave.

  At noon, the Bucklanders abandoned their shameful effort to open the High Hay, the Brandywine Bridge, and the other entry gates along the Bounds to every misbegotten so-called “refugee,” be he halfling, man, elf, orc, warg, Barrow-wight, or worse. Why, it would mean the end of Shire culture, and the mongrelization of the halfling race! No, sir! Not today—not while the Senator was on the job.

  Triumphant but weary, the champion of Shire heritage worked his way, amid a throng of supplicants, aides, well-wishers, reporters, and yes-men, through the maze of tunnels that led to his Hill-side suite of offices. These were the largest and nicest of any senator’s, with the most pantries and the most windows facing the Bywater, but they also were the farthest from the Shire-moot floor. The Senator’s famous ancestor and namesake had been hale and hearty even in his eleventy-first year; the Senator, pushing ninety, was determined to beat that record. But every time he left the chamber, the office seemed farther away.

  “Gogluk carry?” one bodyguard asked.

  “Gogluk not carry,” the Senator retorted. The day he’d let a troll haul him through the corridors like luggage would be the day he sailed oversea for good.

  All the Senator’s usual tunnels had been enlarged to accommodate the bulk of his two bodyguards, who nevertheless had to stoop, their scaly shoulders scraping the ceiling. Loyal, dim-witted, and huge—more than five feet in height—the Senator’s trolls were nearly as well known in the Shire as the Senator himself, thanks partially to the Senator’s perennial answer to a perennial question from the press at election time:

  “Racist? Me? Why, I love Gogluk and Grishzog, here, as if they were my own flesh and blood, and they love me just the same, don’t you, boys? See? Here, boys, have another biscuit.”

  Later, once the trolls had retired for the evening, the Senator would elaborate. Trolls, now, you could train them, they were teachable; they had their uses, same as those swishy elves, who were so good with numbers. Even considered as a race, the trolls weren’t much of a threat—no one had seen a baby troll in ages. But those orcs? They did nothing but breed.

  Carry the Senator they certainly did not, but by the time the trolls reached the door of the Senator’s outermost office (no mannish rectangular door, but a traditional Shire-door, round and green with a shiny brass knob in the middle), they were virtually holding the weary old halfling upright and propelling him forward, like a child pushed to kiss an ugly aunt. Only the Senator’s mouth was tireless. He continued to greet constituents, compliment babies, rap orders to flunkies, and rhapsodize about the glorious inheritance of the Shire as the procession squeezed its way through the increasin
gly small rooms of the Senator’s warren-like suite, shedding followers like snakeskin. The only ones who made it from the innermost outer office to the outermost inner office were the Senator, the trolls, and four reporters, all of whom considered themselves savvy under-Hill insiders for being allowed so far into the great man’s sanctum. The Senator further graced these reporters by reciting the usual answers to the usual questions as he looked through his mail, pocketing the fat envelopes and putting the thin ones in a pile for his intern, Miss Boffin. The Senator got almost as much work done during press conferences as during speeches.

  “Senator, some members of the Buckland delegation have insinuated, off the record, that you are being investigated for alleged bribe-taking. Do you have a comment?”

  “You can tell old Gerontius Brownlock that he needn’t hide behind a façade of anonymity, and further that I said he was begotten in an orkish graveyard at midnight, suckled by a warg-bitch and educated by a fool. That’s off the record, of course.”

  “Senator, what do you think of your chances for re-election next fall?”

  “The only time I have ever been defeated in a campaign, my dear, was my first one. Back when your grandmother was a whelp, I lost a clerkship to a veteran of the Battle of Bywater. A one-armed veteran. I started to vote for him myself. But unless a one-armed veteran comes forward pretty soon, little lady, I’m in no hurry to pack.”

  The press loved the Senator. He was quotable, which was all the press required of a public official.

  “Now, gentle folk, ladies, the business of the Shire awaits. Time for just one more question.”

  An unfamiliar voice aged and sharp as Mirkwood cheese rang out:

  “They say your ancestor took a fairy wife.”

  The Senator looked up, his face even rounder and redder than usual. The reporters backed away. “It’s a lie!” the Senator cried. “Who said such a thing? Come, come. Who said that?”