Robert Coover - Public Burning

Judge Kaufman’s knees go soft as warm Jell-O — fortunately he’s wearing his judicial robes, and all that anybody notices is that he seems to dip with the lights. He glances backstage— at last! Here comes Uncle Sam!

The Boy Judge stretches up to his full five foot six and, glimpsing the hands on the Paramount clock just celebrating the quarter hour, flatly denies Dan Marshall’s motion, then withdraws to the wings to get his wind back. He wants to fall into somebody’s arms, but his wife, Helen, is peering down her nose into a compact mirror, and besides, he’s got an audience back here of lawyers, jurors, witnesses, and G-men. They gaze at him, standing apart. They’ll never let me let go of this thing, he thinks, staring back at them, envying their anonymity. The trial’s over, I shouldn’t even be here, it’s against every principle of American jurisprudence — but they’ll keep me here till the day I die.

Uncle Sam roars out onto the Death House set, whooping and snorting like a wild stallion with a bee up its rectum. “I have returned! And by the grace of Almighty God, I’m gonna tar up the arth and wreak a outdacious deevastation around here if I don’t see more deddycated presarvation of the sacred fire of the Liberty Tree and less petterfacted sunshine patriotism! Great Jeminy! Could I not be gone a minute, but some mischief must be doin’? We’ve had to pump lead into a kid in Paris and throw hunderds a damfools in the hoosegow all over the world — and we’ll trim the heels of a few onduly restless whippersnappers here, too, if things don’t settle out a mite less epileptic!”

The people in the Square hoot and whistle and shout out their praises to Uncle Sam. The Singing Saints regroup to sing “0 Zion, Haste Thy Mission High Fulfilling,” which in turn inspires the security forces to make a coherent charge on the Phantom’s agents at last. Lumberjacks smash up the Clemency Float with axes, and the Rat Pack reorganizes its perimeter defense lines. The Ku Klux Klan, Invisible Empire of the South, announces they’ve paid a visit to Nashville, and children are chasing Dan Marshall toward the Whale’s mouth, screaming the Lady-bug Taunt at him:

“Shyster, shyster! fly away home!

A cross is on fire in your front lawn!”

The Supreme Court Justices are still in a lot of trouble, but Bill Douglas, who has been watching them slop about helplessly in the muck, finally shakes off his wry amusement and, being the only one who’s had the foresight to wear heavy boots and leggings, goes now to their rescue, leading them back to their seats, where Oveta Culp Hobby, whose business is health and welfare, is waiting for them with a damp rag to wash off their faces. While lawyers’ writs and briefs are grabbed, folded into paper airplanes, and sent flying, the lawyers themselves, along with the Rosenberg Committee operatives, are being rounded up, one by one, straitjacketed or simply conked, and dragged over toward Walt Disney’s giant Whale, whose belly has earlier been closed to the public and used until now to incarcerate zanies, sick drunks, and pickpockets.

“Well,” laughs Uncle Sam, “it’s a frolic scene, where work and mirth and play unite their charms to cheer the hours away!” 7:46…“This was the Phantom’s last shot, boys!” he shouts, stooping to attend to his kayoed Mistress of Ceremonies. “You got the bloody Barbarite by the short hairs, nothin’ more can happen now—!”

But just then Times Square breaks into an uproar!

A man is backing bareass out onto the stage from the prisoners’ entrance, his pants in a tangled puddle at his feet, a crumpled homburg down around his ears, “I AM A SCAMP” lipsticked on his butt. The man turns, hopping on one foot, blinks in amazement — why, it’s—!

Is it possible to be rational at all in crisis situations? Do crises seem to have many elements in common? Does the participant seem to learn from one crisis to another? All interesting questions which I might well have asked myself, but at the moment, finding myself unexpectedly onstage in the middle of Times Square, staring out on an amazing sea of upturned faces staring back, my shirttails bunched up in my armpits and my pants in a tangle around my ankles, my poor butt on fire from its Dance Hall skid, my shoulder aching, face stinging, stomach rumbling, sweating hands clutching my still-enflamed though fast-shriveling pecker, Uncle Sam rearing up in monstrous astonishment on my left, some woman out cold as a mackerel at my feet, and the electric chair — for some reason splattered with what looked like custard pies since I’d last seen it — standing spotlit and hot with its own latent energies on my right, flashguns popping and cameras with huge glimmering lenses dollying in at me, a band somewhere playing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” accompanied by what could only have been the goddamn Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and a pervasive odor of excrement in the air which I was afraid might be my own, all I could think of to say was: “Oh my God! LET US PRAY!” Which, when I’d added, dragging my voice down out of its falsetto shriek, “Let me, uh, say, uh, my fellow Americans, uh, bow our heads — let us bow our heads in a minute of silent prayer cast in terms of all our, uh, fighting boys in, uh, wherever they are and for faith, uh, in — and for our President, in a sense — and also for the victims of Communism around the world,” was pretty goddamn brilliant: it shut them all up and gave me sixty precious seconds to get my pants up while they had their heads down. Maybe, I thought, in all the excitement they haven’t even noticed…

While I struggled, sweating furiously in the hot lights, with the birds-nest of trouser legs around my feet — Judas Priest, what a mess, I couldn’t even find the cuffs, and the belt seemed to be looped into some kind of cat’s cradle! — I tried to collect my thoughts for the statement I had to make, the one I’d been working on such long hours this week, but which just now I’d thought I’d somehow got out of. But I was too confused — all those dreams, Ethel’s mouth, the train wheels rolling underneath me — I could smell still the heady fragrance of newfound freedom, new beginnings (what was it? ah! the shampoo in her hair — suddenly I felt double-crossed in every direction at once!) — Christ! I thought in a moment of numbing terror: I can’t even remember my name! I fought to recover that name, that self, even as I grappled with my trousers, hobbling about in a tight miserable circle, fought to drag myself back to myself, my old safe self, which was — who knows? — maybe not even a self at all, my frazzled mind reaching out for the old catchwords, the functional code words of the profession, but drawing a blank. I ought to quit, I knew, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. I only knew how to plunge forward: no matter what the consequences — in college football, it was always the off-side penalty; now, I thought, God only knows what I’m in for! Which reminded me that I was supposed to be praying and the minute of grace was fast running out. Uh…fiscal integrity! Paramount question! Yes…ah…make no mistake about it! What this country needs is…eh…no more pussyfooting! a new departure! ragged individualism — rugged, I mean (“Tell the truth, son,” I could just hear Uncle Sam saying, “or trump — but get the trick!”) — yes, it was time to piss or cut bait, time to basically hunker down, hold the line, take off the gloves and bind up the nation’s wounds — but the gloves were off (what wasn’t off?) and if my own wounds got bound up any tighter than they were already, I wouldn’t be able to breathe (I wasn’t able to breathe!)!