Robert Coover - Public Burning

“Hit ’em where they ain’t!”

“Hey, it’s really wonderful to see so many of you here tonight!” beams Uncle Sam. “It’s the biggest crowd since the hangin’ at Mount Holly in Aught-Thirty-three! And lemme say right here and now, it’s you ordinary folks who’ve made this show possible tonight! If I might quote our elusive Vice President, where’er the hairy li’l tyke might be—” a ripple of consternation passes through the crowd at this news, if news is what it was—“‘God musta loved the common people, he made so many of ’em!’ And I might add, He did a tolerable fine job of it, too!”

The people applaud themselves enthusiastically, Uncle Sam joining in. His handclaps crack and pop like rifle fire through the city streets.

“And I see a heap o’ folks not so common, too! Yes, there’s Vince Astor out there! And Charley Merrill! Jack Rockefeller — hullo, Junior! Give the folks a wave there — can you put a spot on him? We wouldn’t be here without him! Jack Rockefeller, everybody!” Uncle Sam pauses for a burst of cheering, waves at others he recognizes, tips his top hat to the ladies (underneath his hat he’s wearing one of those Dr. T beanies from the Dr. Seuss movie, and when he tips his hat, the yellow rubber fingers make naughty gestures to the ladies): “H’lo, Dinah! Duke! Dottie! Glad you could come! And there’s Jonny Wainwright and Old Man Tose and Artie Sulzberger — and whoa! I see Billy Faulkner, our Nobel Prize-winning mythomaniac! Howdy, Bill!”

“How do you do, suh!”

“How about a few dozen immortal words for us tonight, you old blatherskite?”

“Mah pleasure, suh! What about? Drinkin’ or huntin’ or—?”

“About God, Billy! About God and the Phantom and the chosen people!”

“Waal… In the beginnin’, uh… God created the earth…”

“That’s pretty good…”

“Then He created man completely equipped to cope with the earth.… Then God stopped.”

“He stopped?”

“Yuh see, God didn’t merely believe in man, He knew man. He knew thet man was competent fer a soul cuz he was capable of savin’ thet soul — and not only his soul but hisself…”

“Himself?”

“Yes, suh! He knew thet man was capable of teachin’ hisself to be civilized. It ain’t only man’s high destiny, but proof of his immortality, too, thet his is the choice between endin’ the world…and completin’ it!”

“Aha! A lofty bit of talknophical assumnancy there, Billy — but what about the Phantom?”

“The dark incorrigible one, yuh mean, who possessed the arrogance and pride to demand with, and the temerity to object with, and the ambition to substitute with…and the long roster of ruthless avatars — Genghis and Caesar and Stalin and Bonaparte and Huey Long—”

This mention of the Kingfish gets a big cheer. “That’s whom I mean, okay,” says Uncle Sam, stoking up his corncob pipe. “But what do we do about him, Billy? What do we do about the goddamn Phantom?”

“The answer’s very simple, suh,” says Faulkner, stroking his moustache. “Ah don’t mean easy, but simple… It begins et home.”

“At home?” Uncle Sam blows a smoke ring that floats out to hover over the Nobel laureate like a halo.

“Yup. Let us think fust of savin’ the integer we call home: not whur Ah live, but whur we live: a thousand then tens of thousands of little integers scattered and fixed firmer and more impregnable and more solid then rocks or citadels about the earth, so thet the ruthless and ambitious split-offs of the ancient Dark Spirit shall look and say, ‘There is nothin’ fer us here… Man — simple, unfrightened, invincible men and women — has beaten us!’”

“Sweet Genevieve, Bill! that’s pretty highfalutin’ sesquipedalian advice! When I think on this majestic jazz, mine eyes dazzle! And that word ‘integer’ was a jimdandy, too! Let’s give him a hand, folks, he’s a good ole boy! And pass him a bottle a redeye! That’s right, on the house, nothin’ too good for an old Massassip screamer — that boy can head-rassle with the worst of ’em! All them little integers swarmin’ around — WHOOPEE! you gotta be born and reared up in the swamps to think ’em up like that!” He gives a puff and the smoke halo over Faulkner’s head disintegrates with a little tinkle into a sprinkle of gold dust.

While out front, Uncle Sam picks out more celebrities in the roving spots and hands out foot-long panatellas in appreciation to all those who’ve helped make tonight’s show possible, backstage consternation over the missing Vice President is growing. Some think he might have been assassinated. Others that he’s been kidnapped, or else overslept. Or got picked up as a derelict — those who saw him on the train report that he was looking pretty scruffy. Or maybe the Phantom’s got him! Even as, from back in the wings and down in the subway station, they join Uncle Sam, the Singing Saints, and all the citizens out in the Square in singing a special Happy Birthday on this 19th of June to the Duchess of Dreamland, Bessie Wallis Warfield of Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, they are thinking: Somebody may have to take his place. Maybe it’s me.

Uncle Sam hugs the birthday girl, feet dangling, high off the boards (the Duchess struggles, smiling gamely, to keep her skirt from rucking up over her knees, while out in the crowd, the Duke squirms uncomfortably among his whooping and hollering in-laws), then sets her down, roughs up her hair playfully, and presents her with one of Betty Crocker’s giant angelfood birthday cakes. Amid the huzzahs and many happy returns, Uncle Sam spots the British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill — he coaxes Winnie, who is often confused in the American imagination with W. C. Fields, into coming up on the stage to belt out a few boomers from the Golden Age of the Finest Hour. The P.M. squares his shoulders, winks puckishly, ducks his fat chin in his chest, snorts like a bull, paws the ground with his spatted hooves, jumps up once and cracks his heels together, and with the dignity of pink-cheeked greatness about him commences to bellow like a bona fide blueblood: “Cor blimey! the crisis is upon us, an iron curtain has descended on the broad sunlit uplands, and like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along beyond the soft underbelly of space and time! In the past we have a light which flickered, in the present”—here he raps the chair with his walking stick and whips out a new cigar—“we have a light that flames, so do not let us speak of — darker days, death and sorrow, the quivering, precarious sinews of peace, blood, toil, tears, and bloody ‘ell, God save the Queen, upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization! DREAD NOUGHT! When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite, short words are best! Now this is not the end, everyone has his day and some days last longer than others, it is not even the beginning of the end…”

But while he’s blustering like that, Uncle Sam is filling the stage behind him and secret corners of the VIP section with Minutemen and Green Mountain Boys — suddenly they leap out and point their muskets at Winnie: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,’” they cry, spitting tobacco juice and flourishing buckets of tar and feathers, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government!”