Joe Steele

by Harry Turtledove

“Sullivan!” John Nance Garner said when he walked into the tavern near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “You’re early today, son.” He’d already been there a while. A couple of empty glasses, a full one, and a half-full ashtray sat in front of him on the bar.

  “Sir . . .” Charlie had to work to bring the words out, but he did: “Sir, you need to come back to the White House with me.”

  “I need to do what?” In all the years they’d known each other, Garner had never heard anything like that from Charlie before. He started to laugh. Then he got a look at Charlie’s face. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” he whispered. He gulped the fresh drink, then got to his feet. “Let’s go. I’m . . . as ready as I’ll ever be, I reckon.”

  They walked to the White House side by side. Garner was, if anything, steadier on his pins than Charlie. He was used to bourbon; Charlie still felt the shock of Joe Steele’s death. As they walked, he told the Vice President—no, the President now: he still had to remind himself—what had happened. “So you’re it, Mr. President,” he finished.

  “I never dreamt the day would come,” John Nance Garner said, partly to himself, partly to Charlie. “He’d just go on forever. Only he didn’t, did he?”

  “No. I can’t believe it, either.” Charlie’s eyes still stung.

  When they came up the walk, the guards at the entrance stiffened to attention. “Mr. President!” they chorused. Word was spreading, then.

  In walked Garner. In walked President Garner, Charlie thought, trailing him. Yes, that would take some getting used to.

  Kagan, Mikoian, and Scriabin waited just inside the doors. They also said “Mr. President!” as if with one voice.

  Garner nodded to them. “Take me to Mrs. Steele, if you’d be so kind.”

  “This way.” Kagan gestured. “She’s with—him.”

  Betty Steele sat on the couch where her husband had died. There was room for her and for his body; he hadn’t been a big man. She started to stand when Garner came in. He waved her down again. “Ma’am, I am sorrier than I have words to tell you,” he said. “He was one of a kind, and that’s the truth.”

  She gestured toward the corpse. “I can’t believe—I won’t believe—that’s all that’s left of him. The rest has to be in a better place.” She started to cry again.

  “I hope you’re right,” Garner said. Charlie hoped so, too. Hoping and expecting were different beasts. The new President went on, “You don’t need to move out right away or anything. I can sleep in one of the guest bedrooms for a while. Take some time to get myself up to speed on what all needs doing, but I reckon I’ll manage.”

  “We’ll do all we can to help you, sir,” Mikoian said.

  “Oh, I just bet you will.” Garner’s eyes were gray and cold and hard. They might have been chipped from some ancient iceberg. He paused to light a cigarette. “First things first. We got to let folks know what’s happened, and we got to arrange a funeral that says good-bye the right way.”

  No one said no. He hadn’t known he was President for half an hour yet, but he already saw it took a lot to make anyone say no to the man with the most powerful job in the world.

  * * *

  Casper, Wyoming, had twenty or twenty-five thousand people in it. It sat, about a mile up, on the south bank of the North Platte River. To the south rose pine-covered mountains that reminded Mike too much of the ones where he’d learned the lumberjack’s trade. When he said so at a coffee shop or diner, he often got knowing chuckles; quite a few middle-aged men there were wreckers who had few choices about where they lived.

  To him, it was . . . a place. To Midori, it was a spark of light in an ocean of darkness. The wide-open spaces of the American West awed her till they scared her. She didn’t like to go out of town. Just a few miles, and any sign that humans inhabited the planet disappeared. Japan had next to no places like that. Too many people, not enough land . . . That was what the fight between Japan and America sprang from, right there. Here in Wyoming, it was the other way around—too much land, with not enough people to fill it.

  Mike worked with John Dennison some of the time. He wasn’t a great carpenter, but he could do most of what he needed to do. All those years in the encampment and in the Army had skilled his hands into learning things in a hurry. He did a little woodcutting to bring in extra cash.

  And he bought an old typewriter and banged out a few stories. He submitted them under a pen-name. The first one came back with a note scrawled on the form rejection. Too hot for us, it said. You can write, but you’ve got to tone it down if you want to sell.

  He swore. He wanted people to know what it was like to survive as an ex-wrecker in Joe Steele’s America, dammit. But editors didn’t want to wind up in encampments. After a while, he realized he could write stories that had nothing to do with barracks and thin stew and punishment brigades, but that his attitude toward those things would come through anyway.

  So he wrote stories about Greenwich Village in the Thirties. He wrote stories about breakups where the abandoned party couldn’t help what happened and was left feeling sideswiped by life’s unfairness. He sold a couple of them, not to top markets and not for top money, but he sold. Little checks helped, too. So did the chance to drain bitterness from his spirit, even if he had to do it less directly than he cared to.

  And then Joe Steele died. Mike and John found out about it when they knocked off for lunch and walked from John’s shop to the diner down the street. (John was back in the place he’d used before he became WY232. The fellow who’d denounced him had been denounced in turn, and had died in an encampment. “Who says there’s no such thing as justice?” John would ask—but only with the handful of people he trusted.)

  Snow crunched under Mike’s Army boots. Casper’s climate was less rugged than the labor encampment’s had been. Casper was both lower and farther south. But the first week of March here belonged to winter, not spring.

  The waitress who brought their menus was about their age. John Dennison had known her since they were kids. She got her blond hair out of a bottle these days. She was brassy and usually unflappable. Today, mascara-filled tears drew streaks down her face.

  “Good Lord, Lucy!” John exclaimed. “Tell me who did it to you, and the son of a gun is dead.” By the way he said it, he meant it.

  But Lucy answered, “He is dead,” and started crying some more.

  “Who’s dead?” John and Mike asked together.

  “You haven’t heard?” She stared at them, her eyes wide and red. “The President is! Joe Steele!” She wept harder than ever.

  Mike started to let out a war whoop of pure joy. He started to, but he didn’t. The counterman was sniffling, too. So were almost all the customers. Mike knew one guy sitting at the counter was an old scalp. He kept dabbing at his eyes with a Kleenex, too.

  Even John Dennison looked stunned. And he’d gone into the encampments for what he said about Joe Steele, the same way Mike had.

  “What are we gonna do?” Lucy asked, possibly of God. “He’s been running things so long! How’ll we get along without him?” She blew her nose, then grabbed her order pad. “What d’you guys wanna eat?”

  They told her. She went away. “I don’t believe it,” John said, shaking his head in wonder. “After all these years, I just don’t believe it.”

  “Let’s see if we get some freedom back now,” Mike said.

  “You don’t get freedom. You have to take it,” John Dennison replied. “I wonder if we know how any more.”

  That was a better question than Mike wished it were. He was having trouble getting used to what freedom he had. For fifteen years, Jeebies and soldiers of higher rank had told him what to do and when to do it. Figuring out how to use time on his own was harder than he’d expected. For twenty years, Joe Steele had told the whole country what to do and when to do it. Maybe picking up where it had left off wouldn’t be so easy.

  W
hen Mike asked to knock off early that afternoon, John let him. He ambled around Casper, listening to what people were saying. Anybody’d figure I was a reporter or something, he thought, laughing at himself.

  But he didn’t keep laughing long. Everybody he listened to—in a park and at a gas station, in a general store and at the public library—seemed shocked and saddened that Joe Steele had died. It wasn’t just words. Words were easy to feign. Tears came harder, especially for men. Mike saw more red eyes and tear-streaked cheeks than he ever had before.

  The two things he heard most often were He was like a father to all of us and What will we do without him? He wanted to scream at everybody who said either one of those. He wanted to, but he didn’t. Joe Steele might be dead. Flags might fly at half staff. The labor encampments were still very much going concerns. Anybody who’d been through them once never wanted to see them twice.

  When he went back to the house he and Midori were renting, he found she’d heard the news on the radio. “This is what Japan felt, first when General Tojo was killed, then when we learned the Emperor was dead,” she said. “We thought the world was coming to an end.”

  Mike had never told her he’d been the first American soldier to recognize the dead Hirohito. He didn’t tell her now, either. You tried not to hurt the people you loved. He did say, “General Tojo may not go down in history too well. Neither will Joe Steele.”

  “Who is President now? They say Garner, but I do not know anything about Garner,” Midori said.

  “We’ll all find out,” Mike answered. “He’s an old man. He’s been Vice President since 1933. He’s from Texas. He used to be in Congress. Now you know as much about him as I do. I don’t even know if he can hold on to the job.”

  “Will someone try to take it away from him?” Midori asked. “Can they do that here in America?”

  “If you’d asked me before Joe Steele took over, I would’ve laughed myself silly and then told you no,” Mike said. “Now? Now, babe, all I can tell you is, I haven’t got any idea. We’ll all find out.”

  * * *

  Joe Steele lay in state in the Rotunda of the Capitol. Flower arrangements made a U around the bronze casket. Photographers had snapped pictures of Washington dignitaries—the new President, the California cronies, J. Edgar Hoover, Attorney General Wyszynski, Chief Justice Bush, Secretary of War Marshall, and a few Senators and Congressmen—standing by the coffin. Charlie wasn’t sorry not to be included in those photos. He would have bet all the politicos were suspiciously eyeing the men closest to them. And he would have bet that Joe Steele, dead or not, dominated every picture.

  After the dignitaries withdrew, ordinary people started filing through the Rotunda to pay their last respects to the man who’d been President longer than any two of his predecessors. Nobody had to come. Nobody had to wait in the long, long line that stretched out of the great marble building and down the Mall, doubling back on itself several times. The Jeebies wouldn’t haul you away if you stayed home. People came because they wanted to or because they needed to. They came by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands.

  That outpouring of respect and grief made Charlie wonder whether Joe Steele would have won all his elections even if he hadn’t left anything to chance. He might well have. But he’d never been one to risk anything he didn’t have to. He’d always assumed the deck would be crooked. If he didn’t stack it, someone else would. He made damn sure nobody else did.

  They’d planned to let him lie there one day, till eight p.m. The crowds were so large, they kept the Capitol open all day and all night . . . for three days in a row. When they closed it at last, disappointed mourners threw rocks and bottles at the police and Jeebies who tried to clear them away.

  Joe Steele went into the ground at Arlington National Cemetery, on the Virginia side of the Potomac. His final resting place wasn’t far from where he’d executed the Supreme Court Four and other adjudged traitors. Charlie wondered how many besides him would think of that. Most of the reporters covering the funeral hadn’t been in the business when Joe Steele started ordering people shot.

  John Nance Garner delivered the memorial address. He started by adapting Shakespeare: “I come to praise Joe Steele, not to bury him. For all he did will live on in this country for years to come. He lifted us out of the Depression by our bootstraps. Not everyone now remembers how bad off we were then. He led us through the greatest war in the history of the world. And he made sure the Reds wouldn’t be the only ones with atom bombs. We’re as free as we are on account of him.”

  The new President paused. He looked as if he wanted to light a smoke or take a drink. But this was the time and place for neither. He drew in a deep breath and went on: “Some will say we ought to be freer than we are. Maybe they’re right, but maybe they’re wrong. Maybe this is the way things have to be if we’re going to stay even so free. I don’t know the answer to that yet. I’ll be working on it, the same as Joe Steele was.”

  Another pause. “The President we used to have is dead. I’m sorry as all get-out. I wish I wasn’t standing here in front of you making this speech right now. But even with Joe Steele gone, the United States of America is still in business. God bless America, and God bless each and every one of you.” He stepped away from the microphone.

  By the graveside, Betty Steele gently wept. Most of Joe Steele’s cronies and Cabinet members, as well as the Senators and Representatives and Supreme Court justices who’d served under him for so long, also sobbed. Charlie sniffled a little himself. He couldn’t help it. Had he not been there when Joe Steele died, he might have thought they were all hypocrites shedding crocodile tears. He understood better now. Some losses simply were too big to take in. This was one of them. They could worry later about whether Joe Steele and all he’d done were good or bad. What mattered now was that the man was gone. His passing couldn’t help leaving a void inside everyone who remained.

  Cemetery workers lowered the bronze casket into the ground. They took hold of shovels and began to fill in the grave. Dirt thudding down on the coffin lid was the most final sound Charlie knew. TV cameras brought the funeral to the whole country.

  Dignitaries walked back to their Cadillacs and Lincolns and Imperials and Packards. Some men drove themselves away. Others let chauffeurs take care of the work. Armed GBI guards on motorcycles escorted the small convoy of expensive Detroit cars Charlie rode in: the one that went back to the White House. People filled the sidewalks, many with handkerchiefs pressed to their faces as they mourned. Nobody under thirty-five had any idea what the country’d been like before Joe Steele won his first national election in 1932.

  John Nance Garner (President John Nance Garner—sure enough, that still had just begun to sink in) stood waiting by his limousine as Charlie came up to him along with Scriabin and Kagan and Mikoian. “Mr. President,” Charlie murmured. The other aides nodded, all of them in their somber mourning suits.

  “Gentlemen,” Garner said. He suddenly seemed taller and straighter than Charlie remembered. Going from Number Two to Number One would do that, even if Garner hadn’t looked to be President. He went on, “Gentlemen, I would like to talk with all of you in the conference room in fifteen minutes.”

  They all nodded again, though the look Kagan sent Scriabin said nobody but Joe Steele had any business ordering them around like that. Who did John Nance Garner think he was, the President or something? By the way he stood next to the Cadillac, that was just what he thought.

  Charlie hadn’t been in the conference room since Joe Steele had his stroke there. He shivered when he walked in. The place still overwhelmingly reminded him of the dead President. The lingering aroma of Joe Steele’s pipe tobacco rammed the memory home—smell was tied in with emotion and evocation more than any of the other senses.

  John Nance Garner was smoking a Camel, not a pipe. A drink sat on the table in front of him, but he didn’t pick it u
p. “Hello, Sullivan,” he said. “Who woulda figured it’d come to this?”

  “I know I didn’t, sir.” Charlie glanced at the clock on the wall behind the new President. If Joe Steele’s California henchmen didn’t hustle, they’d be late.

  They weren’t. They came in together, on time to the second. “Mr. President,” they chorused as they slid into their usual seats.

  Garner slid sheets of paper across the table at them and at Charlie. “These are letters of resignation,” he said. “They’re for form. I’m getting them from the Cabinet, too.”

  Charlie signed his and passed it back. If John Nance Garner wanted someone else putting words in his mouth, he was entitled to that. Charlie didn’t know just what he’d do if the new President let him go, but he expected he could come up with something. He might wind up poorer—no, he would wind up poorer—as a newspaperman, but he might be happier, too. He wondered if he remembered how to write a lead any more. Chances were it would come back to him.

  The glances Mikoian, Scriabin, and Kagan sent him were all distinctly hooded. But they couldn’t very well refuse to sign letters like that. One by one, they scrawled their names. Kagan needed to borrow Scriabin’s pen so he could put his signature on the underscored line.

  John Nance Garner set reading glasses on his nose and examined each letter in turn. He clucked his tongue between his teeth and sighed. Then he said, “Mikoian, Kagan, Scriabin—I’m going to accept your resignations, effective immediately. Sullivan, you can stick around a little longer, anyways.”

  Joe Steele’s henchmen stared at him in disbelief too theatrical for any director to use. “You can’t do that!” the Hammer exclaimed.

  “You don’t dare do that!” Kagan added.

  “Oh, yes, I can, and I damn well do dare,” John Nance Garner replied.

  “Why are you doing this?” Mikoian asked. Charlie also thought that was a pretty good question.

  Garner answered it: “Why? I’ll tell you why. Because for the past twenty years you whistleass peckerheads have pretended I’d never been born, that’s why. That’s easy when you’re messing with the Veep. But I’m not the goddamn Veep any more. Now I call the shots, and I’ll keep the company I want to keep, same as Joe Steele did before me. Tell you what, though—I’ll make it easier on you, so it doesn’t look quite so much like I’m kicking you out the White House door.”