Freddy and Fredericka

by Mark Helprin

  Unbeknownst to Freddy and Fredericka in their several-hour, exhausting but euphoric swim, the wind had risen. By the time the river widened, slowed, and found its way into the lake, they could hear it roaring along the ridge tops. As they swam slowly to the meadow side, the air that blew over the water was like the air that comes from an oven when the door is opened, and the sky had once again become cloudless, blue, and dry. Theirs was the fatigue of soldiers in battle, who do not have the time to recognise how drained they are. And hours in the water with wet clothes, boots, and packs had made them different sorts of creatures. When they came out on the bank, they crawled at first, comfortable on the sand and undisturbed that they did not rise. When finally they stood, they walked to the centre of the small meadow to join a dozen others who had escaped the fire.

  Not having ridden the river, few of the tower lookouts, injured smoke jumpers, and rangers were in as good condition as Freddy and Fredericka. Some were in agony from burns, and had the choice of staying in one-person fire shelters as hot as camp stoves, or suffering in the bright sun and terrible wind. They rocked in pain as if to go somewhere, but there was nowhere to go. Others were so tired and beaten that they lay still, and no one greeted the new arrivals.

  “Does anyone have a radio?” Freddy shouted over the wind.

  “I have,” a young ranger said. He was a college student set loose all summer with a trail hook, radio, and pack. For two months he wandered the wilderness from food cache to food cache, clearing paths and caring for markers. It was a splendid job for a young man of a certain temperament, something that, like military service, would colour the rest of his life.

  “Is a helicopter coming?” Freddy asked, knowing better and shouting over the wind.

  “Not when the wind’s eighty miles an hour.”

  “Do they have any idea when it will die down?”

  “They say this evening.”

  “Then we just wait?”

  “Yes,” said the ranger, “and hope that the fire doesn’t come down the valley, or up it.”

  “Where’s Lucia?”

  “Who’s Lucia?”

  “The chief of the Centennial Line.”

  “I don’t know her.”

  She hadn’t come in. Freddy looked about. Everywhere his eyes alighted, most of the trees were untouched. Though the valley had been spared, it was pure tinder. “Why are we here?” Freddy asked.

  “It’s the safest place,” the young man answered.

  “No, if the fire sweeps over the ridge on these winds the trees will ignite into a firestorm.”

  “That’s why we’re in the meadow.”

  “You don’t understand,” Freddy told him. “If the wind provides the impetus, the flames could superheat and form into a kind of tornado that as it travels eats up everything it touches. It doesn’t have to be fed continuously; it feeds upon itself. Something like that can move right across this open space faster than we can run, and everything standing would go in an instant.”

  “Are you a forester?”

  “I’m not, but the same thing happens in large-scale bombing, even with no wind but the wind created by the firestorm itself. It takes the oxygen from the air. It’s bloody hell.”

  “That’s why H1 is the refuge. They must have had experience in other fires. Obviously, it’s protected by the topography, which is why it hasn’t burned.”

  “The wind,” Freddy said. “We should get the shelters up immediately.”

  They began with the injured, pegging their sacks to the ground, pulling up the grass around them, and covering them with a spray of earth. It was hard work, and they had to drink from the lake often, because in the high heat water simply flowed out of them. As this was happening, Lucia walked in. She threw down her knapsack, looked over the injured, went to the lake, and immersed herself, staying only as long as she needed to wash off the soot and ash and get cool. When she rose from the water and returned to the group, her black hair was dripping and her eyes were clear. She knew that no helicopters would be flying: the only things flying were brands, too heavy to travel on ordinary winds, that set clear areas on fire as if a mythological runner had gone from one to the other with a torch. She knew about firestorms, and encouraged everyone to continue with the shelters. Freddy and Fredericka, the least exhausted, were assigned to carry water and pull grass. They doused the ground, the shelters, and the people lying by them. As soon as they wet the earth around the shelters the water disappeared, but it would cool the ground so that if the worst were to occur the ground itself, full of organic matter, might not burn.

  When the shelters were up and Lucia and the young ranger took over the bucket transport, Freddy and Fredericka were to set up theirs. Freddy’s was out when he looked at Fredericka and saw her clawing through her pack. “I don’t have it,” she declared.

  “Are you sure?” Freddy went through the pack visually and with his hands. She didn’t.

  Lucia threw a bucket of water at them. “Where’s your shelter?” she called to Fredericka over the heightened wind.

  “I don’t have it. I must have lost it in the river or left it behind when I repacked the pack.”

  “It’s my fault,” Freddy told Lucia. “I had her repack it.”

  “Does anyone have an extra shelter?” Lucia asked. No one did. “Check your packs and your neighbour’s packs. It would be a shame for someone not to be in a shelter when one was sitting bunched up right next to him.” When this was done, she announced: “We have eleven shelters and twelve people.”

  Shelters could hardly fit even one: people had died because they were too tall or too heavy to close them properly, allowing the heat to follow them in.

  Over the rising wind, Lucia said to Fredericka, “You won’t die here.”

  “That’s right,” said Freddy, “she won’t.”

  At this, Freddy and Lucia looked at one another, both with love and in a contest of wills that Freddy, who was much older, a royal personage, and a man, was certain he would win.

  STANDING IN THE WIND and glare, Freddy was dizzied and almost delirious, but he felt in the diminution of certain of his capacities a transference of strength to his resistance and will. No king of England had ever died in a forest fire, he told Fredericka as they watched a front of flame, like an incoming tide, crest the valley ridge as if climbing a ramp, pause, and flow toward the lake.

  “Get in,” Freddy told her, with so much love and finality that her heart broke as she knelt, her face now beautifully stained with ash. “I’ll submerge myself in the lake.”

  “You said the surface might boil.” Her voice shook.

  “I know.”

  “Freddy,” Fredericka said. “Freddy.”

  “Fredericka, my duty is neither to win nor to survive, but to uphold. If I should fall, blending in with the mass of men, so be it. My only purpose in the world, and the only shining thing, is to have done right.”

  “But kings take for themselves,” Fredericka insisted. “They always have.”

  “This is a new world, Fredericka. And this is the one glory left to a king. I know that now.”

  He kissed her, and then he glanced at the firestorm, which was beginning to roar over the lake. “Get in,” he commanded, and began to help her in. Looking to his left, he saw Lucia’s empty shelter. “Where’s Lucia?” he asked.

  Lucia, behind him, hit the back of his head with a folding shovel. He fell flat on his face, unconscious.

  “Close up!” she ordered Fredericka, as she dragged Freddy toward her shelter. With the last of her strength, she put him in, placing her feet against his shoulders and pushing with her legs. As she sealed the shelter, the wall of flame already reddening her with burn, she saw Fredericka, not yet closed in, tears streaming down her face.

  “Why?” Fredericka asked.

  “Oh,” said Lucia, falling to her knees to lessen the area of pain from the heat that had begun to consume her. “Tell him . . . for mother and child, for father and child.” She smiled.
“And for king and country.”

  “My God,” said Fredericka, as if to convince her not to do what she had already done irrevocably, “it isn’t your country.”

  And Lucia answered, with her last words, “It was once.”

  IV.

  PARADISE REGAINED

  FREDDY ESCAPES FROM THE MENTAL HOSPITAL AND ENTERS AMERICAN POLITICS. WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

  LIKE ALL POLITICIANS, Dewey Knott put out a great deal of information about his work habits and noble qualities. Just as President Self, who since his student days hadn’t read anything other than budget documents or captions under photographs of naked women, was said to read four hundred scholarly books each year, so the flacks of Dewey Knott, who knew that Dewey was confused by the Yellow Pages, said he, too, devoured hundreds of tomes, although when asked about this at a press conference he thought that tomes was the Spanish word for tomatoes. “Let’s see,” he said, counting on his fingers. “Every time I have a salad, I finish at least half a tome. Say, about three quarters a day. California tomes, really great. Great state. The Golden State. Florida, too. Yeah, I love tomes. And I think that the people who produce those tomes need all the help they can get because of unfair competition from Mexico.”

  “How do you find the time, Senator?” asked a sexually magnetic female reporter.

  “What time?” Dewey asked, eyes glazing over.

  “Ten-thirty, Senator,” an aide replied, because Dewey asked the time by saying What time?

  “What time is she talking about?” Dewey clarified.

  The reporter said, “The time to consume all those tomes.”

  “Are you kidding?” Dewey asked. “It’s no problem to consume three quarters a day. If I wanted, I could go through ten a day, really.”

  In the shocked silence, Sam Donaldson was not about to let this pass. “Ten a day, Senator? Do you stand by that number?”

  “Yeah. That would be easy. In the fifties I did that on the advice of Linus Pauling.”

  “Senator, if you please,” said the scourge, “would you name some of those tomes? Right now?”

  Dewey laughed at him and said, as if he were talking to an idiot, “I wasn’t aware that they had names.”

  “Titles.”

  “Titles?”

  “Yes.”

  Thinking that now he really had him, Dewey said, in a mocking tone, “Well, one was called Lord Beefsteak, and another King California Red.”

  As this exchange was disseminated around the country and throughout the world, the reporters came alive like sharks on a pod of dying whales. “Who wrote those, Senator?” he was asked from the back of the pack. “Who wrote King California Red?”

  What cretins, Dewey thought. “My, you people are strange,” he said, enjoying what they were doing to themselves. “They aren’t something that someone writes. They grow in nature, by themselves, on a bush.” Dewey looked at the crowd of motionless reporters and laughed out loud. “What’s the matter with you people? Who wrote them? Are you mad? Do you think that I read them? Maybe you read them. I don’t read them, I eat them.” And then he walked off, laughing and shaking his head.

  “Oh,” he said to Finney a little later, when informed of the meaning of the word. “Just tell those idiots that it’s the Spanish word for tomato.”

  “But it isn’t the Spanish word for tomato.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “The Spanish word for tomato,” Dewey asked, “is nothing? I like tomes better. Sounds a lot more Spanish. Nothing sounds English, or Ghost.”

  “Ghost?” asked Finney.

  “Well, you know.”

  “I don’t, but nothing doesn’t mean anything in Spanish. Tomes means nothing.”

  “We’ve been over that, Finney, and that’s wrong.”

  “Okay,” said Finney, “but what am I going to tell them?”

  “What are you going to tell them?”

  “I don’t know. Self has just released a list of a thousand books he’s supposed to have read since he was sworn in. I doubt that he’s read one.”

  “They’ll kill him,” said Dewey, “just like they kill me. They’ll ask him details from some book about Egyptabology.”

  “No they won’t. They all voted for him. They’ll say, ‘Mr President, how brilliant do you have to be to read a thousand books while saving the nation?’ and he’ll say, ‘Very brilliant,’ and that’ll be that.”

  President Self, who had the lower body of a baby elephant, was reputed to run twelve miles a day and do an hour of weight lifting and gymnastics, so Dewey took up Tai Chi and was seen walking from his house to his limousine in a martial-arts outfit with a black belt (which was actually the tie he used for funerals). President Self was supposedly an expert on pre-Columbian pottery, so Dewey, who had no idea what that was, made a campaign trip to Easter Island and was photographed looking with tremendous suspicion at the statues, perhaps because he had slept on the plane, and believed he was on Martha’s Vineyard.

  “Boy!” he said to his press entourage. “Look at those crazy things. Who put them there, and why? What happened to the T-shirt shops and frozen yoghurt places? And isn’t it impressive,” he said, slyly injecting a political point, “that Senator Kennedy swam here all the way from Chappaquiddick?”

  So with work habits. According to the serpentine and mendacious White House flacks, President Self worked twenty-hour days and was ever vigilant. Even on the golf course he listened to tapes on monetary theory or studied Tibetan religious documents. Thus, Dewey, who went from couch to couch the way infantrymen in Normandy went from hedge to hedge, and who had seen every episode of Gilligan’s Island at least twenty times and could and did lip-sync all the parts, had to “put in” twenty-hour days. When the reporters began to stake out the entrances to his campaign headquarters and he no longer could slip away, he began to live in his office, where lights burned in the windows as he counted sheep on an air mattress. He locked the door from the inside and played a tape of him talking on the telephone, typing, dictating letters, and singing along to Patti Page’s “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” The Secret Service thought he was a man of iron, especially when, at four a.m., rested (as they did not know) from nine hours of sleep, he would emerge in a fresh shirt, newly shaven, cologned, voluble, bright-eyed, and caffeinated, and go downstairs to a press conference at which he would dazzle the half-dead reporters with his energy before roaring off to the airport to fly to a campaign rally in what he once referred to as West Dakota.

  Finney was delighted with the workings of this scheme, and filled with admiration when sometimes Dewey would emerge dishevelled and as tired as a young lawyer. How clever, Finney thought, for him by imperfection to perfect untruth. But what Finney didn’t know was that Dewey had no such stratagem, and that when he appeared fatigued it was because he really was fatigued. Unbeknownst to anyone, including the Secret Service (which Dewey innocently, and perhaps undiplomatically, called “the SS”), Dewey had a secret door in the private study where he played Kate Smith records, drank bourbon, and tried to decipher the racing form. The door had been installed as a defence against terrorists when the building was an annex of the Israeli Embassy. Such security features were ideal for a campaign headquarters, and not even Dewey’s closest aides knew of the two-foot-high door that opened out through the wainscotting of a back hall, next to a fire stair. It was under the bar sink, and Dewey had discovered it while looking for a place to hide his malted milk balls from Dot. Every few days, as if he were a grotesque Alice in Wonderland, Dewey used this door to go into the almost empty ten-storey building, as alone and unmonitored as a dandelion seed floating on the wind. He did not simply wander, but went purposefully down to the darkened fifth floor, to a large room that in the daytime was filled with sun-deprived clerks who had not a single window. Here Dewey flipped the switch on a hundred coffered fluorescents that turned the quiet space into the N
evada desert at dawn, and here he stayed until just before he had to shower, as deep in concentration as if he were disarming hydrogen bombs.

  This was the mail room, into which flowed the outpourings of an irritable and unsure nation. Letters from bearded automobile mechanics in northern Missouri who wanted to keep their guns, and from silver-haired Philadelphia matrons who wanted to take them away; from people whose entire beings orbited around substances, whether gold, marijuana, pesticides, or potatoes; from those who had recently discovered their strong convictions to those who had recently been convicted; from the pro and the anti to aunties and professionals; from Eskimos who desperately wanted sex change operations (why have two when you can do nothing and get the same result?) to Rockefellers writing about composting toilets; from movie stars, egg handlers, bonefish guides, cashiers, helicopter pilots, sex maniacs, accountants, asparagus farmers, autoworkers, ballet dancers, trick shots, puppet makers, biology professors, and people who lived on the street. Every single one was absolutely convinced that he knew the way and that Dewey should urgently carry out a plan that was invariably presented to him at great length. And every single one expected that Dewey would carefully read his letter and reply in longhand.

  As far as anyone knew, no one read these letters other than the high school students who sorted them into 125 different categories for form-letter reply. How amazed they would have been to discover that several times a week Dewey would sit for hours in their chairs, touching the papers they had touched and reading the letters that the letter writers would assume—after receiving a machined reply—he had never seen.

  But he did read them, by the thousand, and this fed his uncanny political instincts, without which he might never have entered the District of Columbia other than on a school bus. He read them with Dewey-like randomness, which is to say with no more plan than the wanderings of an unescorted puppy. It frequently amazed people when he would refer to these letters as if they, too, had read them: “What about that girl whose crutches the Social Security Administration wouldn’t pay for? Got billed a thousand dollars month after month. Interest. Father’s an octopus fisherman in San Francisco. Owes a million dollars. Gotta do something about that. All she eats is octopus. Gotta help her. Gotta do something.” This might be on one of the Sunday morning talk shows, in which case Finney in the darkness off-set would mouth the answer to the question that he would surely have to answer in Dewey’s behalf: “I don’t know. I haven’t got a clue. You’ll have to ask him.” They thought Dewey made these things up.