Robert Coover - Public Burning

“That’s…that’s true,” I agreed, vaguely aware of the wind commencing to blow across Burning Tree, but unaware at the time how prophetic he’d been — or had he been telling me something I should have picked up on? Should I have got Edgar to put a watch on Douglas right then? I was too distracted to think about it — a few days to play with, a couple of days’ delay: then Pat and I could still get hit with it!

“This week, son! We gotta move!”

“Yessir!” I cried, and took a violent swing at the ball, topping it again and sending it skittering this time into the rough about a hundred yards away. Well, shit, at least I was off the tee.

“Damn it all, boy!” thundered Uncle Sam, rearing up off the bench, brandishing his putter like a saber and stomping forward like Ulysses Grant debouching from his field tent. “The brave man inattentive to his duty and who don’t keep his eye on the ball is worth little more to his country than the coward who deserts her in the hour of danger! Life is real! Life is earnest! You gotta get on top of this thing! You gotta get your ass in gear!”

“I’m sorry… I just can’t seem to get the hang—”

“That’s just it! We gotta get the hang! We gotta exsect these vinimous critters this week or our name is shit with a capital mud! This ain’t just another ballgame, johnny, we are gonna have to fight for the reestablishment of our national character , and we shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth — namely, me!”

“You—?” I croaked. “But you…you’re…you can’t—!”

“Die? Oh, I ain’t immortal, son, I’d hate to think I was. Nothin’ goes on forever, Amber, not even History itself, so why should I? Sooner or later, the Phantom gets us all!”

I was truly shaken. I caught myself staring at him the way I used to stare at my mother when I first realized that she had to die. Suddenly, everything seemed very fragile and tenuous. Brittle. “But you’re so…so strong—!”

“Remember the old kings, boy, the times don’t change. I’m the force what’ll raise up the whole sin-besotten world, see if I don’t…but I’ll get et by it, too!”

“I… I don’t understand…?”

“I would not live alway, I ask not to stay, loveliest of lovely things are they, on earth what soonest piss away, so long as you get your kicks in in the passin’! That’s poetry, boy! Xerxes the Great did die; and so must you and I!”

Yes, I was shaken, but oddly I also felt like I was very near the center of things. There’s been a point to all this, after all, I thought. I felt closer to Uncle Sam than I’d ever felt before.

“Oh, probably, after it was over, like Christ, I could come back some day…” He sighed wistfully, puffed on his pipe, blew a plume of smoke shaped like a bird — an eagle. “But it wouldn’t be the same…” He added wings and it flapped off into the sun: I was blinded by the light, but as far as I could see it simply disappeared. When I looked back at Uncle Sam, he was staring at me very strangely, his blue eyes glowing as though lit from behind. “Sometimes,” he said softly, “sometimes I almost want to die….”

A cold chill rattled through me. My sense of Uncle Sam’s presence in front of me dipped briefly, almost imperceptibly, as a candle will gutter in a faint draft — and for that fraction of a second, I seemed to have an intuitive awareness of everything happening in Uncle Sam’s head. And then, as quickly, it had passed. My head ached slightly and I felt a momentary emptiness down in the marrow of my bones. Then that, too, filled up.

“Don’t worry,” Uncle Sam laughed, “it ain’t such a grave matter, if you’ll pardon the pun, son — in fact, it’s a lot more fun this way.” He put his arm around me and led me down the fairway toward my ball, his white locks blowing in the cool breeze. He seemed to have shrunk some in the last few minutes. “It’s like old Tom Paine useter say, panics in some cases got their uses — we ain’t had a party good as this one’s gonna be since you were just a little tyke sayin’ your breakfast prayers back home on Santa Gertrudes!” I felt swarmed about with fears and absences. Paradox. But I felt protected at the same time. I had a feeling that everything in America was coming together for the first time: an emergence into Destiny…. “Oh, I don’t reckon we could live like this all year round,” he said, “we’d only expunctify ourselves. But we do need us an occasional peak of disorder and danger to keep things from just peterin’ out, don’t we?” I nodded, remembering my own peaks — the Hiss Case and the Checkers speech, and before that my school highs, debate wins, romances with Ola and Pat, the war, even my brothers’ deaths — and I knew how they could light things up, make everything new again: after all, that was what light and darkness, the sacred and the diabolic, death and regeneration were all about! “Well, okay,” said Uncle Sam, pocketing his corncob pipe and clapping me on the shoulder, “let us, then, be up and doin’, with a heart for any fate; still achievin’, still pursuin’, and though hard be the task, keep a stiff upper lip!”

“Oh, yes!” I said, flushing with pride and joy and eager to begin, for he’d just singled me out among all men: that fractured echo from the past was a piece of Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” which Grandma Milhous penned by hand under a photo of Abe Lincoln she gave me on my thirteenth— thirteenth ! — birthday! I kept it on the wall above my bed all through high school and college: Learn to labor and to wait! “I will!”

“Good boy!” he said. “I press thee to my heart as Duty’s faithful childering! Be prepared for anything, for this is one a them hard contests where men must win at the hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold, dear! But be brave, and whatever happens, just remember the sagassitous words of that other Poor Richard long ago: ‘Fools make feasts… and wise men eat ’em!’ So whet up that appetite!” He hugged me, then gave me his club to swing with, saying: “Now, listen here, a golf ball is propelled forward by the verlocity imparted to it by a club-head, see — this is physics, now, my boy — and it’s kept aloft by under-rotation or backspin, which producifies a cushion of air, and this is what gives the ball lift. To get this backspin, the clubhead’s gotta travel downward , right swat whippety-snap through the center of the ball, and this is where you been goin’ wrong. You think you gotta lift the ball up, and this is makin’ you pull your swing…”

“Ah…”

“Actually the uplift is projectorated by the spin, and the spin is got by hittin’ down and through , you got it? Now, another problem is movin’ your maximum verlocity back to six inches…”

Down and through, got it. I took a practice swing, keeping my shoulder down, my eye on the ball — then, because when I looked up I realized that people were staring at me (got to watch it, can’t let my guard down like that), swung on up into a friendly wave at a carload of Senators disembarking the subway car. “See ya, Dick!” “Don’t miss the show!” “Not for the world!” “Take it easy!” Down and through. And out and up, back to the office, get rid of this goddamn thing. With maximum verlocity.

The curtain rises upon the Warden’s office, a large old unfriendly apartment, with bare floors and staring whitewashed walls, furnished only with the Warden’s flat-topped desk and swivel chair, a few straight-backed chairs, and an eight-day clock. On the Warden’s desk are a telephone instrument, a row of electric bell-buttons, and a bundle of forty or fifty letters. There are two large windows, crossed with heavy bars, at the back of the room, and doors left and right. The Warden is verging toward sixty, and his responsibilities have printed themselves in italics upon his countenance. With him, staring out the window, is the Prison Chaplain, dressed in slightly shabby clericals. The Chaplain’s face, normally calm, intellectual, and inspiring, is presently depressed. The Warden blows a cloud of smoke to the ceiling, drums on the desk, and peers over his shoulder at the Chaplain. He clears his throat and speaks brusquely: “Has it started raining?” “Yes, it has,” says the Chaplain, without turning around. The Warden glares at his long thin cigar and impatiently tosses it aside. He is wearing a dark brown suit, open shirt, and black string tie. “It would rain tonight,” he complains.