Robert Coover - Public Burning

“Wha—?! How…how did you—?”

“‘Oh, Ethel! I’d do anything for you!’ Shame, shame, Richard! No wonder they’ve been punishing you!”

“I… I was just pretending! It’s true! I’d gone up there to — Grandmother! Why are you writing all this down?”

“Ah…the, uh, better to counsel you with, my dear,” she’d replied with a faint tight-lipped smile.

It was about this time that I’d begun to recall all those notes to myself about letting down too soon after crisis. For one thing, my Grandmother Milhous was dead, had been for years. For another, there hadn’t been any secretary at the OPA, that had just been — and then it had come to me, like the punch line of an old joke heard a thousand times over, who it was: “Edgar! You!”

“You know, Dick,” he’d smiled, chucking me under the chin, “the reason you’ve never been any good at making out is that you talk too much about yourself!”

“Goddamn you, Edgar!” I’d stormed, slapping his hand away. “It’s been you all along!”

There were noises out in the Square now and crowds of hostile people were being shoved toward us into the Whale. “Come on, Dick,” Hoover had said, smoothing down his heavy skirts, “I’d better get you out of here before the choice between the quick and the dead goes the wrong way for you….”

Ah, why should an honest man enter public life and submit himself and his family to this kind of thing? Of course, a man who goes voluntarily into the political arena must expect some wounds in the battles in which he engages, but it seemed to me I suffered more than I deserved to. Both Pat and I had perhaps what one might describe as an overdeveloped sense of privacy. I know, people in political life have to live in a fishbowl. Every public figure, whose most important asset is his reputation, is at the mercy of the smear artists and the rumormongers, that’s politics, but no matter how often you tell yourself that “this is part of the battle,” or that “an attack is a compliment because your adversaries never bother taking on someone who amounts to nothing,” there are times when you wonder if you shouldn’t chuck the whole business.

Ethel’s aria had faded and in its place, somewhere in the distance, far beyond the bedroom window, I seemed to hear somebody whistling, and what they were whistling was: “Happy Days Are Here Again!” My song! Oh my God! I knew who it was — was he coming here? I shrank back, panting wheezily, my heart in my throat, tears springing to my eyes. I felt like I used to feel whenever I’d hear my old man approaching in a rage, clutching his razor strap. Even if it wasn’t for me. Things would sort of light up and get reddish all around me, inside as well as out, and that was what happened now. I squeezed my eyes shut: oh shit, hadn’t I suffered enough? And when I opened them again, sure enough, there he was: standing in front of me near the fluttering curtains, his eyes glittering with animal menace, a cold sneer on his lips, the pallid gray light falling through the open window on his goateed face making him look suddenly old and ugly.

“Come here, boy,” he said, smiling frostily and jabbing his recruitment finger at me with one hand, unbuttoning his striped pantaloons with the other: “ I want YOU!”

“But—!”

“Speech me no speeches, my friend, I had a bcllyfulla baloney — what I got a burnin’ yearnin’ for now is a little humble toil, heavenward duty, and onmittygated cornholin’ whoopee! So jes’ drap your drawers and bend over, boy — you been ee-LECK-ted”

“Wha—?!”

“You heerd me!” he roared. “E pluribus the ole anum, buster, and on the double!” He dragged me backwards into the light, whipped my pants down, gave my ass a cracking caress: “Ah, an old old sight, you scamp, and yet somehow so young — aye, and not changed a wink since first I seen it! Bless me, you look purtier’n a tree frog on a fence rail with the wind up!”

“Please!” I whimpered. “I can’t—!”

“I’ll help you,” he whispered girlishly, tickling my rectum. “Come on, loosen up, Nick! unlock the ole Snack Shack and impart to me summa your noble spirit, like, eh, like the lady says…”

But I scrambled out of his grip while he was fumbling with his braces, bounded back into the blankets and dog biscuits. “My God, you’ve— gasp! — just killed her!” I cried, cowering in a dark corner. “How can you make fun of her like that, she’s not even cold yet—!”

“Cause I’se wicked, I is,” he replied with a wolfish grin, flashing his incisors. The air seemed thick with a heavy doggy stink, but I didn’t know if it came from him, me, or Checkers’s gear. “I’se mighty wicked, anyhow, I can’t help it — she’s part a me now, both her and her brave engineer, just as much as Pocahontas, Billy the Kid, or Bambi—”

“You didn’t have to kill them! You just did it for fun! You’re a…a butcher! a beast! You’re no better than the Phantom!”

“Aw fidgety fudge, them two raskils was lucky—”

“Lucky!”

“Sure! It ain’t easy holdin’ a community together, order ain’t what comes natural, you know that, boy, and a lotta people gotta get killt tryin’ to pretend it is, that’s how the game is played — but not many of ’em gets a chance to have it done to ’em onstage in Times Square!”

I knew that what he was telling me was the truth — but what about the way I felt? He wasn’t telling me everything, I thought…. “All they wanted was what you promised them, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration—”

“Bah! The wild oats of youth! Listen, bein’ young and rearin’ up agin the old folks makes you fotch up a lotta hootin’ and hollerin’ you live to regret — puritanism! whoo, worse’n acne! It’s great for stirrin’ up the jism when you’re nation-breedin’, but it ain’t no way to live a life!”

“You’ve…you’ve changed,” I said, my voice shaking. “You’re not the same as when I was a boy!”

He laughed softly and reached into the darkness to snatch me by the nape in his viselike grip. “You’re forty years old, son: time you was weaned!”

“No!” I begged. “Please—!”

“You wanta make it with me,” he panted, dragging me brutally out of the shadows and spinning me around, “you gotta love me like I really am: Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler, gun-totin’ hustler and tooth-’n’-claw tamer of the heathen wilderness, lusty and in everthing a screamin’ meddler, novus ball-bustin’ ordo seclorum, that’s me, boy — and goodnight Mrs. Calabash to any damfool what gets in my way!” He licked his finger.

“But you…you can’t—!”

“Can and will, my beauty, can and will! You said it yourself: they’s a political axiom that wheresomever a vacuum exists, it will be filled by the nearest or strongest power! Well, you’re lookin’ at it, mister: an example and fit instrument, big as they come in this world and gittin’ bigger by the minute! Towerin’ genius disdains a beaten path — it seeks regions hitherto unexplored — so clutch aholt on somethin’ and say your prayers, cuz I propose to move immeejitly upon your works!”

“No!” I cried. “Stop!” But too late, he was already lodged deep in my rectum and ramming it in deeper — oh Christ! it felt like he was trying to shove the whole goddamn Washington Monument up my ass! “For God’s sake!” I screamed. “You’re tearing me apart!”

“No gains without— grunt! — pains, son,” he replied coldly, forcing his way in inch by inch — or was it yard by yard? Why had I ever doubted him? “You hanker for the fast track, the— mmf! — dust of the arena, the big leagues — well, these things are what you— uff! ah! — pay!”