Ishmael Reed - The Terrible Threes

“You really think so, Destar?”

“Tink so. I knows so, boss. Why dat Black Peter is impostor anyway. We check it out. He speak English very bad, boss. Very bad. He say, we bees, as in, we bees going. He don’t know how to conjugate verbs, boss, like I do. I went to school in London—”

“Yes, yes, you’ve told me a number of times, Destar. But I think you’re wrong, I knew about the impostor four years ago when I … when I—”

“Boss, don’t worry about dat. Don’t you worry. You choose wrong man. Dis Dean Clift have no credibility, and so when you make your appearance, though you change him, nobody believe, boss. Wasn’t your fault. You have a better idea this time. It will really alter the course of history. You so great, boss, you so—” Destar began sobbing.

“What’s wrong, Destar?” Nick said.

“I just tink, boss. I’m so happy to be of service to you. A … bug like me, able to do my part for Western civilization.”

“You’re a loyal elf, Destar, and if you continue such devotion I’ll see to it that you get that English country manor you were never able to obtain during your earthly stay.”

“O, tank you, boss, tank you, would you like a little lamb dish with some curry before we prepare for our annual journey?”

Nick nodded.

Bob Krantz bunked in Nance Saturday’s apartment for the night. He was up all night going to the bathroom and occasionally his trips stirred Nance. Krantz woke up screaming several times. He had a bad night. At breakfast the next morning, Krantz told Nance the whole story. Nance sat there, stunned. Reverend Jones and his pretend friends. The possible murder of Admiral Matthews. And most shocking of all, Operation Two Birds. During the Iran-Contra investigation in the 1980s, it had been revealed that Oliver North was part of a plan to round up all of the black leaders and put them in camps. But those plans sounded mild in comparison to Two Birds, which called for low-yield nuclear attacks on cities with surp populations, poor blacks, Hispanics, Asians, no longer the model minority, and the millions of whites who were as useless, nonvital and up to no good like the rest. Nance was shocked. He knew that a lot of people in power were crazy, but not that crazy. A preacher in the White House talking to ghosts. Operation Two Birds. A computerized superhero robot on loan from Hollywood. The murder of the Secretary of Defense.

“Look, Virginia Saturday is my wife. My ex-wife. You could go on her show. Tell the world about it.”

“Who would believe it? Look what they did to Dean Clift after he made those claims. They’d do the same thing to me.” Nance thought about it. He stroked his heavy mustache. It was so heavy it must have weighed about two pounds.

“Maybe you have a point.”

“Besides, I’m still indebted to Reverend Jones. He saved my life.”

“But now he’s trying to get rid of you. What kind of loyalty is that?”

“Reverend Jones is the only man in America who can stop our country’s sinking into the abyss.”

“You talking about niggers?”

“No, why get so sensitive? We’re not against blacks. There are blacks who are high in the government. The man who now runs Reverend Jones’s evangelical empire, Reverend John the Conqueror, is black. He does all of the preaching while Jones advises Jesse Hatch on how to run the government.” Krantz looked at his watch. He walked over to the TV set and turned it on.

“Damn, all you do is watch the news all day.”

“Maybe there’ll be something about—”

Jesse Hatch was answering questions from reporters.

Q: “Mr. President, are you telling us that Robert Krantz developed this whole scheme, that nobody in the White House knew about it?”

A: “That’s right, he was going to explode neutron bombs on Miami, New York, and other cities with large concentrations of surps, and blame it on our ally, Nigeria, and then destroy some nuclear generators in Nigeria.” Nance looked at Krantz. “It’s not true, he’s lying,” Krantz said. Krantz and Saturday kept their eyes trained on the set.

Q: “Bob Krantz was brought into the White House by Reverend Clement Jones. Has Reverend Jones been informed of this development?”

A: “Reverend Jones is really disturbed about the news, ladies and gentlemen, and he’s shocked that Krantz has usurped the power of the Oval Office.”

“That can’t be so, Jones was in on the plan from the beginning,” Krantz pleaded. The camera switched to Reverend Jones. He seemed to be near tears as he told the reporters how Krantz had been like a son to him, and how he was so disappointed that Krantz had gotten involved in such a nutty scheme. Krantz turned off the television set. He sat in a chair, gazing out the window. Nance went over and placed a hand on his shoulder. There was a knock at the door. Nance answered. It was a man. He and Nance talked for a minute, as Krantz sat in the living room of the two-bedroom apartment. Nance and the man disappeared into a room that Nance referred to as his “office.” There was a procession of people into the apartment all morning. Men and women. Women with children and babies. This went on until about twelve noon, when Nance said he had to start making his runs to La Guardia.

Nola Payne, Supreme Court Justice, wasn’t able to finish her address before the National Association for the Advancement of Feminists. She was heckled and treated rudely by those who had fought to make her the second female Justice on the Supreme Court, having become disillusioned with the first one, among whose first decisions was one holding that President Nixon was above the law. Nola was accused, by the feminists, of voting on the side of the patriarchy ninety-nine percent of the time and having abandoned those who had made her.

A questioner had asked Nola about her statement in an op-ed printed in the New York Exegesis that women had been crippled by their former oppression and that now was time for a new feminist responsibility and a mature feminism. That the feminists hadn’t proven that they had gone beyond the phase of rage and storm. That their problems weren’t being imposed from the outside.

She said that they could no longer blame their problems on sexism, but now had to look to themselves, to their own self-destructive behavioral patterns for an explanation for their failure. That the society had become gender blind. She said that they had to change their culture, give up their clinging to men, their Cinderella fixation, their addiction to dependency so that men would accept them. She said that if men discriminated against them — maybe it was their fault.

A woman got up and called her a middle-class bourgeois bitch. When she said something good about her male colleagues on the court they called her a traitor and started to boo her. Somebody asked her about the court’s scheduled review of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Dred Scott Decision. She said that the court just wanted to take another look at them, and when someone quoted Reverend Jones’s speech quoting Genesis:9 that slavery was a good thing, and that it solved the unemployment problem, and that he needed some hands around his house to help his wife with her watercolors, she said that Reverend Jones didn’t have a racist or sexist bone in his body, and that blacks, gays, Asians, and other surps were not carrying their weight, and that this was the reason for the West’s decline. Tumult erupted and Nola Payne had to leave by the back entrance. As her chauffeur drove her home she took more than a few swigs from a flask of bourbon she carried around. By the time she reached home, her blood alcohol content was way above that of the legal limit. He had to help her up the steps of her lavish Georgian home, and her maid had to undress her and help her into her nightgown.