Robert Coover - Public Burning

“Oh you dirty beggar,

Oh you dirty crumb!

Ain’t you ashamed

To show your dirty bum!”

Uncle Sam watches these procedures with a rueful smile, then turns his attention to his kayoed Mistress of Ceremonies, Betty Crocker. He stuffs the false teeth back into her soft gaping jaws and revives her with a splash of six fluid ounces of Tennessee sour mash, observing as he throws that the old girl has taken quite a beating and is probably going to need a face lift once all this is over. Betty rears up, shakes her head, grabs up her rolling pin, smoothes down her skirt, wipes off her jowls with a swipe of her sleeve, snaps her choppers once just to test her grip on them, and then proceeds to lay into every dubious character in sight — not even the bureaucrats are safe, and some Congressmen are seen diving under their chairs. “Hoo-hah!” laughs Uncle Sam, watching her swing away. “I wish the Phantom could see that!”

He cracks his bullwhip over Betty’s head, snatching a couple dozen silver stars off the shirts of patrolmen and state troopers, then a couple dozen more, converts the whip into a Louisville Slugger and, tossing the badges up in the air, swats them out into the night sky (they seem to stick up there and glitter like something out of a fabulous movie they’ve all seen but can’t quite remember. Graceful is his form, and slender, and his eyes are deep and tender, as with a smile that is childlike and bland, he next turns the whip/bat into a Remington and commences to shoot the stars all down again, knocking them off like clay pigeons— crack! pop! — and splattering the heavens with glittering sprays of light like bombs bursting in air! The Singing Saints, their Mormon decorum recovered, zip up and step forward to accompany Uncle Sam’s act with their own rendition of “Land of Hope and Glory,” but before they can even get as far as the “wider still and wider shall,” Uncle Sam — glancing anxiously up at the clock, whose hands have been sliding inexorably up toward eight o’clock — cuts them off: “Whoa thar, fella patriots! Enough a this high-minded bullshit, it is rather for us to be here deddycated to the great task remainin’ before us — thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it is lightnin’ what does the work — or as old Ben would say, when there’s a great heat on the land in a partickyular region and a passel a clouds comes by full of electrical fire — LOOK OUT BELOW! Yea, it is nigh onto Zero Hour, friends and neighbors! We got a pair of misdemeanin’ poachers back there at the settin’-off end of the Last Mile who gotta take their farewell trip to that promised land, gotta pay, as we say, the debt of nature, slip the cable and cock up their toes — and toot sweet! So an end to this foolish hurrahin’, the tea party’s over! It is time to make room on earth for a little warmth, a little zap of love’s bestowin:’ then nighty-night to them scallywags, cuz it’s rubber tire buggy, rubber tire hack, they gotta walk that lonesome valley, and they ain’t a—“

Suddenly, there is a sharp whirr-CLICK! , like gears meshing toward some final connection, and then — BONG! BONG! BONG…! — all the clocks in New York City, all the clocks in the nation, in the world, strike the fateful hour, making people gasp and bite their fingernails: it is eight o’clock! From the belly of the Whale comes a woman’s scream: “In memory of the Rosenbergs!” —and the Whale begins to rumble and tremble as though with a fearsome indigestion, an indigestion that sounds like a lot of hysterical amateurs trying to sing “Go Down, Moses!” The people shrink back—

“Hey, no flinchin’ out there!” booms Uncle Sam. “Soft-heartedness, in times like these, shows sof’ness in the upper story!” He snaps his finger and jabs it at Police Commissioner Monaghan, and George sends his Deputy Patrick Kirley scrambling in to the Whale like a gun-toting antacid to quiet things down in there: one belch and it’s over. “Come on, you doddrabited whey faced no-good varmints! Now is the hour! With firmness in the right as God gives us to see to the right, we are gonna drop the handkerchief and light a candle of understandin’ in these traitors’ hearts which shall not be put out till they’ve sizzled like a wet cat flung into a kittil of bilin’ fat! Huu-u-u WEE! Whilst the stars and stirrups floats in the breezus whar, whar in the name a Jeezus is that miserbul termatis-nosed skaley-heeled rapscallious skonk who will not, with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and skeer-provokin’ loomynations, lay hold — from one end a this continent t’ uther — the hangin’ rope!? EH?? Do you hear me, o ye that love mankind? It is time, I say, to loose the fateful lightnin to reach a fiery rod, and on Death’s fearful forehead write the autygraph a God so’s any squinty-eyed inimy can read it without his spectacles! So let the burn begin! All I got, and all that I yam, and all that I hope, in this life, I’m now ready to stake on it!” He takes a final deep puff on his corncob pipe and — precisely at one minute after the hour — produces his zinger: a huge smoke ring that rises slowly, scaling the cloudy summits of the Times Tower, hovers momentarily up there over its tip, then sinks down over it, unrolling like a condom — he blows at it and it bursts into a spectacular fireworks display, in the center of which, halfway up the tower, is the blazing message:

NOW COMES THE MYSTERY!

He flashes a final salute to his wildly cheering citizens in the Square—“ I got a million of ’em!” he laughs, tipping his star-spangled plug hat forward on his stately brow in the best Broadway tradition— “And so now I bid you a welcome adoo, brave Americans all — long may our land be bright with freedom’s holy light, you may fire when you are ready, Gridley!” —and then he disappears, leaving to Betty Crocker the task of setting the final places at the table.

The first of tonight’s special guests to appear, introduced by Betty (with a nod to the National Poet Laureate) as “the nation’s number one legal hunter of top Communists,” is the chief prosecutor in the case, Irving Howard Saypol, now a State Supreme Court Judge — he strides manfully to his front-row seat with all the calm confidence, as Saint Mark would say, of a Christian with four aces, a natural winner, with a big chest, a burgeoning belly, a tough jaw, cold eyes like Uncle Sam’s, and a cocked pistol in his hip pocket. He is accompanied by his wife, his children, his chief assistants in the case, Myles Lane, Roy Marcus Cohn, Jim Kilsheimer III, and Jim Branigan, Jr., and all their loved ones. The prosecution team is followed out by the various witnesses at the trial, Betty urging them along like a schoolmarm lining up her kids at the toilet door, everyone from chubby-cheeked David Greenglass, his wife Ruth, and dapper little Harry Gold in his now-familiar pinstripe suit, which prison fare is making baggy on him, to the notorious Red Spy Queen, Elizabeth Bentley, who regrettably is not quite a Blue Angel after all (in fact she looks like a spinster librarian, the kind that tear all the naughty pages out of the books), and Jim Huggins, the immigration inspector from Laredo who helped Morty Sobell across the border. Sobell himself, no longer so tight-lipped as he was at the trial, is kept well out of sight, though his wife Helen has been seen tonight, getting herded into the Whale.

And then the Texas high-school marching band strikes up the theme song (no longer, thank heavens, recognizably Russky) from “The FBI in Peace and War.” Saypol, his team, and the carefully developed witnesses got all the headlines at the time of the trial, but of course it was the corps of hard-working agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation who really cracked the case — men like Bob Lamphere and Hugh Clegg, Dick Brennan and T. Scott Miller, John Lewis, and not to forget Walt Roetting and John Harrington and all the other unsung backstage heroes of the case — and it is these men (some of them holding replicas of John Dillinger’s death mask up in front of their faces to protect their secret identities) who now march out as a unit to a thundering ovation, carrying on their broad shoulders like an archbishop or a winning football coach their world-famous boss, J. Edgar Hoover, said by many to be the most powerful man in all America. Hoover — who is still tidying up, rolling down his pantcuffs and tossing what looks like a wig and bits of clothing back to his faithful sidekick Clyde Toison, standing in the wings — is a little fatter maybe than his comic books like to show, but he is nevertheless a commanding and heroic figure, especially held way high up like that, and whenever he flashes that beloved Jimmy Cagney grimace of recognition, part menacing grin, part sharp-eyed scowl — which he does now, reaching down at the same time to slap the hand of one of the agents supporting him — you’d think from the enraptured roar of the populace out front that it was at least the Second Coming. They pass down through the honor guard to their seats in the special section, exchanging ritual winks with old acquaintances like Dick Tracy and Bruce Wayne, Steve, Daddy, Rip and Kerry, and receiving unabashedly grateful hugs from Miss Lace and Mopsy and Stupefyin’ Jones.