Chapter 18
Huckleberry Finn
I had dinner that night with Ben and Chet in their apartment. Ben did the cooking, and all of us did a lot of laughing. At the hotel, the Ambassador, where Dicky had killed Robert Fits and I had once seen Nancy Wilson sing, I checked WMN for news of Huffa, and found nothing yet. Next morning, I returned the car to the airport and flew to Houston. If anyone missed Huffa, it still wasn’t in the newspapers, either.
Quincy had a big bachelor-condo in a central-city high-rise. Ben’s and Chet’s apartment could fit in it two or three times. Quincy answered the door, and he asked me to come in, opening the door wide with his left hand, waving me in with his right. The gesture had become a habit for him, and I always imagined a cowboy hat in his waving hand. My sons were very different from each other, and each great in his own way.
I plopped down on a modern sofa in the glare of the sun through the big windows and peered out into nothing but blue sky. Quincy picked up a newspaper from the coffee-table and stuffed it into a trashcan beside some bookshelves. It didn’t look like any other trashcan I had seen. But it plainly served the purpose for the paper.
“Want a drink, Dad?” asked Quincy. “Whoops. Not the right question.”
“Alright,” I said. “Tell me the story. I see you’re up for it. And I’d like a beer.”
Quincy looked at me much as Ben had looked at me while I was laughing on his telephone. He went to his kitchen, which also had a window to the living room, with barstools at it. He opened a bottle of Budweiser and set it on the counter of the window without looking at what he was doing. He returned through the door to the living room and moved the beer to the coffee table. He returned to the kitchen and brought himself back another beer. He sat in a big white chair that matched the sofa. Then he talked.
“I was drunk. I was driving. I was speeding. The police stopped me. I was alone and bailed myself out with a credit-card, after the four hours the police said it takes to get sober. I took a taxi home, because they impounded the car, and I tried to call you in the morning. Mom said you were in Los Angeles. I called my brother.”
“Anything else?” I asked. “You didn’t hurt anybody?”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t hurt anybody.”
“Is it going to happen again?”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
“Sounds simple,” I said. “Why did you need so much to talk to me?”
“Great expectations,” said Quincy. “I want to be part of what you’re doing.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Twice, a problem. Once, a fluke.”
He didn’t seem to me to take that answer as final. So I went on.
“Can I ask you another question?” I asked.
“It’s what I hope you’re here for,” he answered.
“Whatever happened to that pretty girl Laura, the one you introduced us to at Harvard. We thought you were in love, and your mom was ready to start knitting booties and increasing our investment in photo-albums. I remember your mom asking you about her a few times later, but your answers were short. All that’s years ago now, all of it, I guess. I guess we gave up. What happened?”
“She went back to Midland. She’s the librarian for the high school.”
“So you know what happened to her. I want to know more about you.”
“Oh, I guess I took your advice to heart,” he said. “Well, it wasn’t your advice. It was advice you said a friend of yours gave you, to get your feet wet before getting married. Okay, alright, I see your point, in this.”
“What point?” I asked.
“You got your feet wet in the Pacific Ocean. I got mine wet in a drunk-tank.”
“That wasn’t my point,” I said. “But I’m very happy that it’s yours.”
“Was that a Skull and Bones friend?” asked Quincy. “Have I met him?”
“No,” I said. “Lev is far beyond Skull and Bones and hard to find from time to time. I guess you might meet him someday, if he thinks it’ll do you some good. He advises me on how to behave in what many call polite society. I mean how to tread lightly among bigots and hypocrites. Thank God and your mom that you’re not one of those. Anyway, I’m glad we had this conversation.
“You’ll be alright. You are alright.”
“I’m going to call her,” he said. “Laura.”
“Good,” I said. “That’ll please your mother.”
Quincy knew it pleased me too, and it eased my facing Beatrice, after what I’d done. After a couple of days, Huffa’s family and business accomplices admitted publicly that they didn’t know where in hell he was. The FBI made a serious search for him, to the extent of once visiting the El Dorado. But, of course, he wasn’t there, and they didn’t check the dump. Only I on Earth knew what I’d done, ever.
But few knew much about any of this, and the nation had not forgiven the Republican party for Dicky’s dufusness. So Gerald was out, and Jimmy was in, and few would see the significance of that, either. Jimmy was a genuine gentleman, and Roselyn a genuine lady. Their bumping me out of Langley was a mistake. But I understand.
Jimmy replaced me with an Annapolis buddy of his, an admiral who simply didn’t understand coversion, as neither do I on my best days. Worse, the admiral tried to carry Jimmy’s ideals into the CIA, and the old operatives there bridled as they had at Fits Jr., but with the additional notion that an admiral should know better. Fits Jr. had tried to tell them how to do their job, but the admiral was trying to tell them how to feel about their job. They were soldiers following orders, and the one freedom a soldier has is that he isn’t paid to feel. So they particularly resented that coming from an admiral.
I, however, admired Jimmy’s and Roselyn’s ideals, which they dauntlessly tried to actualize through their presidency, at the cost of their having no second term, as I knew they would. Part of why I asked Linden to do all he could to get them in was to actualize that idealism, and part was that they’d surely be out in time for Mikhail and me to move.
Jimmy’s and Rosalyn’s main ideal was feminism, and it was also their main road out of their presidency. A lot of people said Jimmy was another Fits Jr., and that helped much in his winning of their presidency, as my John Wayne impersonation helped me into mine. But claiming Jimmy was like Fits Jr. was stupider than most falsehoods, being serendipitously false but grotesquely false. Jimmy got into a little trouble by saying in an interview for Playboy magazine that he had committed adultery in his heart. But Rosalyn was always in his heart, and together they did more for women’s rights than has any other presidency. I don’t know if they knew the economics, but they went ahead.
How feminism cost Jimmy and Rosalyn a second term of presidency is basic economics, supply and demand. Since the unemployment rate is based not on how many people are not working but on how many people are both not working and seeking to, encouraging women’s confidence to seek employment increased the unemployment rate. Next, by finding jobs, women were able to buy more, demanding products they hadn’t been able to buy before, and more production in general. A result was temporary pain.
Of course manufacturers couldn’t catch up immediately, either for the lines the women most wanted or for the more generally desired products. So, as economists like myself basically say it does, the lagging of supply behind demand increased prices, what we call inflation. Thus we had stagflation, the only time in history when inflation and unemployment increased simultaneously. And another of Jimmy’s ideals didn’t help the United States economy much either. He worked with his heart for the Holy Land.
Successors of Ben Gurion and Nassar, successors of the leaders who had inherited Egypt and Canaan from the French and the British, ultimately by way of the rationality of ending imperialism without the care one might expect the sense to signify, met at Camp David by Jimmy’s diplomacy. The name of the site was symbolic, reminding everyone directly participating there of events and persons important to the history of strife in that region of Earth. Christians claim the Israelite King David to be a direct ancestor of Jesus’ Earth father, and Zionists initiated the war of terror at the King David Hotel, killing 92 British and Palestinian Canaanites, many of them nurses. The meeting was at Camp David, on land named Mary. The history is long and hard in this. But plain to anyone who looks.
One of the participants at the meeting was the founder of the organization that had bombed that hotel, and now he was prime minister of Israel. Jimmy was a Christian, and one of the few persons I’ve known who have lived up to the claim to be so, and the third participant was the president of the nation that had enslaved Israel, kicking the whole thing off. People all around Earth called it a historic meeting. That’s for sure!
Nothing ever came of it but words. But that meeting’s words are carried now as banners, high memories of the persons present. Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister, continued his Zionism in the face of plain sense, and never lost a beat in his regression. Anwar Sadat, the Egyption president, died in a hale of bullets from people calling themselves Muslims thinking he had spoken too politely with that old Israeli terrorist. Jimmy lost his and Rosalyn’s presidency, while no American denied that he was a nice guy. All are martyrs to the cause of peace, on Earth in their separate sense of life. All Earthlings have been, day after day and millennium after millennium.
Many thought the economic woes of Jimmy’s presidency were because of diplomatic failure in the Middle East, because of Jimmy’s inability to control OPEC, the Organization of the Oil-Exporting Countries, and they were partly right. But most citizens of the United States neither knew nor cared enough to try to think of whence the economic woes had risen. They just knew they didn’t have a job, or they just knew that bread was costing much, or they just knew that Ronny’d been in movies. So they threw Jimmy and their economic prospects to the wind.
So I became Vice President, somewhat quietly on the loud but soft coattails of Ronny, when we had Mikhail where he needed to be to finish his part of our job. Of course the last note before the finale was letting Ronny have the nominal presidency, leaving me sixteen years of actual presidency and sixteen for our sons, were we to need that much more time. It was a forty-year symphony Mikhail and I and Skull and Bones had orchestrated well, within the peace and patience of Beatrice and our other friends, and we finished it excellently also, but not without a few glitches, here and there.
The campaign went exactly as the party had planned it. Ronny and I ran against each other in the primaries, to give my résumé more popular recognition. I expressed disagreement with Ronny’s economics, to the extent of calling his views voodoo economics, thinking of New Orleans. Then we made a public deal, letting Ronny run for president with me as his running-mate, getting votes from people who disagreed with him. As Fits Jr. had done in the sixties, we won by broadening our voter-base.
Then the presidency ran as we had planned it, with me taking direct responsibility for the National Security Council, assuming de facto the responsibilities Klingmonger had officially for Dicky. We put Texas friends of ours and others of our choosing into powerful staff positions, and Ronny slept about twelve hours a night and in many of the meetings he attended. Besides Bedtime for Bonzo, Ronny’s job was mostly to make speeches. He was both an actor and sincere. So everyone loved him.
Lev, meanwhile, spent a summer traveling around the United States working on carnival rides. He had long wondered how Gypsies lived, and he had an affection for carousels, for horses going merrily around. He put the two together for some fun, and told me about it. At one fair, he saw Ronny deliver a speech.
“It was in Springfield,” he said, “at the Illinois State Fair. I thought it was neat, because Springfield claims to be Lincoln’s birthplace. You know, I should have come and tried to call on Lincoln while I was alive. He was a great spirit, a genuine poet.
“Anyway, Ronny spoke to a grandstand full of people, full of Illinois farmers. He arrived in a limousine, but he spoke surrounded by bails of hay, and he took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves before he opened his mouth. Then he told a joke.
“’A traveling salesman,’ he said, ‘was traveling through this great state of Illinois, at 55 miles per hour, as is the law.’
“He pronounced that last phrase loudly, because a movement was on to increase his nation’s speed limit beyond what Jimmy’s congress had set after the OPEC situation in the seventies. I prefer sledges and sleighs and traps, myself. But that’s just me.
“’And,’ he said, ‘the salesman saw a chicken in the road in front of him, not trying to cross the road but running down it in front of the salesman’s car. As the salesman caught up with the chicken, the chicken speeded up.
“’So, the salesman speeded up. Forgetting the law, he followed the chicken. And again the chicken speeded up, and again the salesman speeded up. Then the chicken turned off the main road, onto a dusty side-road.
“’The salesman slammed on his brakes and turned down the side-road to follow the chicken, but the chicken was now out of his sight, over a hill. The salesman drove over the hill, but still he didn’t see the chicken.
“’But, in his sight, was a little house with paint flaking off it, and a man rocking on the front porch. His thumbs in the straps of his bib-overalls, the man was looking down the road in the direction in which the chicken had run.
“’The salesman stopped his car in the farmer’s dusty drive and rolled down his window and asked the farmer if he’d seen a chicken running past there at about 75 miles per hour. The farmer said he had indeed seen it.
“’”Yup,” said the farmer. “It’s one of mine.”
“’”One of yours?” the salesman answered. “Well, are my eyes playing tricks on me, or did that chicken have three legs?”
“’”Yup,” said the Farmer. “I breed ‘em that way.”
“’”Why?” the salesman felt compelled to ask.
“’”Because,” said the Farmer. “Ma likes the leg. The boy likes the leg. And I like the leg. I had to.”
“’”Well, my goodness,” the salesman asked. “That’s amazing. How do those legs taste?”
“’“I don’t rightly know,” the farmer answered. “I haven’t been able to catch one yet.”
“After Ronny told that joke,” said Lev, “he told that grandstand full of farmers that he was going to cut off their crop-subsidies, and the farmers rose to their feet and applauded and shouted as though they were at a rock-concert.
“I saw you a few weeks later,” Lev told me then, before I thought of something to say about Ronny’s joke, “at the Oklahoma State Fair, in a morning before the fair was open for the day. We, my carnie friends and I, heard somehow that you were coming, and a game-agent called Jimmy the Jag had word that you were going to visit his basketball-joint. I know you remember, but I’ll tell you how it looked to us.
“Jimmy wandered all over the midway looking for a stuffed elephant to give you when you shot and made your basket, and he knew you’d make it because anybody could. The basket was so close to the counter that kindergarteners could. They made their money by giving cheap prizes. The prizes cost less than the price to play.
“Carnies call games like that buildups. They sucker you into playing more by letting you trade the cheap prize in for less-cheap prizes, as you pay and play more until you have something you can brag about at home. But Jimmy the Jag just wished you’d make one shot, so he could give you the huge stuffed elephant he’d found.
“So there we all were. I was sitting on the counter of a balloon-dart game a friend of mine operated, and your secret service was sitting in a little train for taking people around the midway. In a panama hat, the carnival-owner led you into the roped-off area and up to Jimmy’s joint, and Jimmy handed you a ball. You missed four in a row.
“I don’t know what your problem was, because I know how good you are at baseball and horseshoes, but you were embarrassing Jimmy, and that wasn’t easy to do. Carnies had plenty of cause to call him a jag, the word being carnie-talk for conscienceless. But, at last, you made a basket, on your fifth shot.
“Jimmy left the elephant where he’d put it, draped over his counter. He reached up the wall, past the cheapest prizes but not to the top. He grabbed a Yosemite Sam doll and handed it to you, without a smile but with a grin. Your grin was your second expression there, as you turned away to the television cameras.
“A few yards away, you handed the Yosemite Sam doll to the carnival-owner, and I never told you about this, because it bothered me. What on Earth were you thinking about? What were you up to there and then?”
“I was up to the vice presidency,” I said. “When you’re vice president, you behave as a vice president. When I’m president, I’ll make some regulation-range basketball-shots on TV for you.”
But Ronny didn’t do subterfuge. He was called the great communicator more because he said what he thought than because of how he said it. He didn’t even conceal his contempt for how I did his job, as he didn’t practice the pretensions now taught in college communication classes, but rather persuaded by sincerity.
That that was unique is ridiculous, and indicates our problem. Earthlings called it charisma, but it was sincerity, and horribly rare. Hitler was also charismatic, and sincere while his horror was far worse than silly. Hitler’s charisma killed millions in his lifetime and more by his inspiration later. Ronny’s died in his sleep.
And it needed to. Ronny, like Hitler, was a charmer. But, similarly, he called pacifists grass-eating know-nothings. I call that what humans call Hectoring, and it was Ronny’s main weakness as it was Achilles’, as it is of all the people who treat war or anything else as though it were a valid source of private pride.
Mikhail, with that blotch on his head, had hardly any charisma. He made his way into position by subterfuge, by selectively agreeing with people whose presence he could hardly bear. But he did make his way into position, exactly as he’d planned he would, and right on time. That domino-theory of his worked well.
Brezhnev died two years into Ronny’s presidency. Andropov assumed Brezhnev’s position, promoted from his directorship of the KGB, and dropped off two years after that. By the end of my first term as vice president of the United States, Mikhail was president of the Soviet Union. What a coincidence.
I won’t bore you with the details of how we shuffled drugs and weapons to get the hostages out of Iran and the Sandinistas out if Nicaragua, but I will tell you that the means were better than alternative means and that the end was best for all, and I wonder how baby-boomers didn't see how those means were necessary.
Why didn’t they see that the means were better than their alternatives, and why didn’t they see that the lieutenant-colonel and the admiral and the civilian nominally in charge of the National Security Council fell from power for what I did, while the press was reporting that I was over all in charge.
The answer is that you, the people of the United States of America, form your opinions without paying attention. You insist, in your laziness, despite your freedom for education, that everyone has a right to his opinion, and you let democracy go to hell because thinking you’re right is more important to you than being right.
Meanwhile, I and my friends, who had no interest other than common decency and needed nothing from anyone, tried to help you clean your mess by methods always available to you. We might have done more this trip, but the rules were that we couldn’t stay longer than one ordinary life of yours.
We can come back for other trips, if we leave you a generation of your ordinary own to develop what we try to show you. But the best I could do, after you voted me out of your presidency, was to hand you over to my sons, to do their best as well. So I began my presidency with that in mind.
On my inauguration day, after the last playing of “Hail to the Chief” as though I or anyone could lead a nation, while my darling Earth-wife was tending to our private quarters where we’d sleep in your Whitehouse, I called my Earth-sons to my Earth-office, yours shaped much like Arthur’s table. I sat behind my desk, while my sons sat in French provincial chairs before it, chairs older than the Lady Liberty in New York Harbor. I thought of the French and the British and the Italians and the Irish. I thought of the Israelis and the Palestinians. And the gangs of New York and L.A.
I thought of Afghans and Genghis Kahn, and Tiananmen Square and Formosa and Red Square, and the Tokyo tower and the Eiffel tower and the Empire State building, and the Watts towers and the depths of Dachau. And, thinking of what ever happened to Amelia Earhart, I thought of love and honey and milk and ears that hear or don’t and harts as stags or does or fawns, and sea urchins and coral reefs and how the sky is blue, however we call colors, whatever we call. The yellow of the sun.
I thought of maple-leaves, and the seeds that spawn the trees, and of children making them scream, and I thought of how such play has produced saxophones, and how it all can turn to truth or lies. But, at hand, before me, were my sons, as the aroma of roses wafted into my Earth-mind through French windows, closed now mostly for the winter, waiting for the spring. At least my sons were not imagination.
“Welp,” said Ben. “You did it.”
“Yup,” said I. “We surely did.”
“How does it feel?” asked Quincy.
“Lonely,” I answered. “Thanks for coming.”
“Dad,” said Ben. “I know you talk to us and tell us how you feel, but you talk about so many things I don’t know what you feel most strongly for. I mean, I know you feel most strongly for Mom, but what about the rest of the world.”
“Well, you’re next,” I said. “Whether you know it or not.”
“We know it,” said Quincy. “He’s asking about your agenda.”
“Well,” I said, doing a little impersonation of Ronny, “Mikhail and I have to clean up this Cold War business, of course. But a model for that is something that’s been going on for a whole lot longer, millennia in the face of all of Earth.”
“The Holy Land,” said Ben.
“Yes,” said I. “And I don’t know what to do. The Civil Rights movement is on track, and I think I can get Nelson out of prison and into power, and Manuel Noriega out of power and into prison. Idi Amin’s already out of everybody’s way. But what can I do in the Holy Land? What can we do there?”
“Our oil connections give you a lot of influence in the area,” said Quincy.
“Oil wells don’t dig nearly as deep as the trouble in Canaan,” I said.
“You’re funny, Dad,” said Ben. “Calling it Canaan. I like that.”
“So do I,” said Quincy. “What about what Jimmy started?”
“Those people are all gone, and nothing changed,” I answered.
“No,” I said. “They’re not all gone. Jimmy’s still working at it, and Yasser’s still there and waiting for a fair and even chance. And, after all, I am the president of the United States, and I have two sons who care as much as I and Jimmy do. So, do you remember you’ve agreed to govern California and Florida?”
“Yassuh, boss,” said Ben.
“You bet,” said Quincy.
“Well,” I said. “We’ll have to start working on that.”
I looked at them, and they shrugged and nodded.
“Crap,” I said, looking at Ben. “You know I don’t remember ever asking you what you learned in school. Besides that I should have as your father, I guess it’s important to how you’ll handle being chief executives of the governments of two of the four most populous of the United States. What do UCLA and Harvard teach political science and business administration majors? Anything useful?”
Ben and Quincy looked at each other and grinned, then outright laughed.
“No, Dad,” said Ben. “Don’t worry about it. We wouldn’t have known how to answer you, anyway. They teach a lot of details most of the students will never use in any job, and they teach some fundamentals that everyone should use in any job.”
“That’s right,” said Quincy. “And you have given us some sound advice. You told us to be sure and involve ourselves in extracurricular activities, and I learned from my extracurricular activities that most of the students scoff at those fundamentals.”
“That’s right,” agreed Ben. “Quincy and I have talked about this, and he says the leadership fundamentals he learned in the Texas Air National Guard are the same as in his Harvard textbooks, and he told me most of our nation’s military ignores them, too.”
“It’s good to have a brother,” agreed Quincy. “I wonder if I’d get a different perspective from a sister, to help me understand our mom, and Laura. But maybe Ben and Chet can help with that."
“I see what you mean now, Dad,” answered Ben. “Hypocrisy is stupid and counterproductive. That is, it’s evil.”
“How about political science?” I asked.