Hazards (2 page)

Well, they put their heads together and started whispering up a storm, and finally they broke up their little pow-wow and Consuela walked up to me.

“Señor Jones,” she said, “I have…we have a proposition for you.”

“All three of you?” I asked. “It’s a little out of the ordinary, but I suppose me and the Lord could bend the rules a bit for three such lovely ladies.”

“You misunderstand,” she said. “We want you to become the president.”

“From what I seen, being president ain’t a job what comes equipped with much of a future — or even much of a present, when you get right down to it. Why me?”

“You’d be perfect for it,” said Raquel.

“We could tell right off that you were a man of distinction,” added Maria.

“Besides, you’re all that’s left,” said Consuela. “All the other men are dead or have fled to neighboring countries.”

“You are not on either side, so as the people begin returning to the city they will have no reason to distrust you,” said Raquel.

I walked over to Joe’s body. “This here was one of Nature’s noblemen,” I said. “By rights he should have been your next president, and I want it understood that if I take the job, it’s just as his stand-in. I’ll run the country exactly the way he would have run it, and I wouldn’t dream of doing nothing as president that he wouldn’t have done. Anyone got a problem with that?”

“No, Señor Jones,” said Consuela. “Or should we call you Doctor Jones?”

“A simple El Presidente should do the trick,” I said. “Where’s the presidential palace from here?”

“Three blocks north, Presidente,” said Consuela. “We will take you there right now.”

We had to step around an awful lot of unsuccessful candidates for the office along the way, and I decided that my very first official act had better be to hire a small army of street cleaners. After about ten minutes we walked up to this stately-looking mansion which probably had four or five less windows than Buckingham Palace and maybe a little shorter driveway than the Taj Mahal.

“Where’s the treasury from here?” I asked.

“It’s in the east wing,” said Consuela.

“You mean it’s part of the palace?”

“The last 27 presidents didn’t want to let it out of their sight,” she said.

“Why don’t we mosey over to it and see what all the fuss was about?” I said, and a couple of minutes later we were in this big underground vault that had piles of money everywhere.

I felt an urge to put it in neat orderly stacks and admire it for a while, but first I figured I’d better spend a few days counting it, just to see how much I could borrow in times of need. But before I could start, Consuela grabbed my arm and began leading me away.

“You can do the bookkeeping later, Presidente,” she said. “Right now you have more important tasks awaiting you.”

“What’s more important than counting money?” I said as I fell into step beside her, and Raquel closed and locked the vault behind us.

“I realize that the money looks impressive today,” explained Consuela, “but it won’t last. Between inflation and the debt your predecessors ran up, the treasury will be empty in less than two months. We must do something about that.”

“Don’t forget that we also have to make plans to hold free elections,” added Maria.

I thunk on it for a bit, and suddenly a great big Heavenly revelation hit me smack between the eyes.

“I do believe I got the solution to both problems,” I announced.

“Free elections
and
the treasury?” asked Consuela.

“Who says they have to be
free
elections?” I said. “We’ll make ’em
expensive
elections and charge anyone who wants to vote a million dollars, or whatever our currency is, and that’ll put money in the treasury at the same time we’re holding an election.”

“And what will become of you, Presidente?” said Maria. “What if some very wealthy men covet your job?”

“I’ll just pop into the vault the night before and borrow as much as I need to vote early and often.”

“You know,” said Raquel, “he’s already more resourceful than Ferdinand or Umberto.”

“And he’s cuter than Riccardo,” added Maria.

“Riccardo was a hunchback with a clubfoot and steel teeth,” Raquel pointed out.

“
You
found him attractive enough,” said Maria.

“It was the uniform,” said Raquel defensively. “It blinded me to his true nature.”

While they were arguing about whether Ferdinand was brighter than a potted plant and Riccardo was more attractive than a moldering corpse, we finally reached my office. It was about the size of a football field, with a huge, hand-carved mahogany desk at one end. There was a box of foot-long cigars sitting atop it, and I lit one up, sat down on the chair, and put my feet up on the desk.

“You know, ladies,” I said, “I got a feeling that I’m going to like the president business.”

“Don’t like it too much,” warned Consuela. “You’re only El Presidente until we can reinstate the constitution and live in freedom and harmony.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “I ain’t looking for no lifetime job. I figure twenty years ought to do it. Thirty at the outside.”

“I don’t think you fully understand your situation,” she replied.

“What little tidbit am I missing?” I asked.

“It was a lifetime job for the last 35 presidents.”

“Yeah, well, when you put it that way, I can see where we might move the schedule up a mite,” I said. “In the meantime, I suppose we got to change the name of the town again.”

“To Lucifer?”

I was about to agree, but then it occurred to me that calling it Lucifer would tell anyone aspiring to high office just who stood between them and their goal, and suddenly slapping my name on all them signs didn’t seem like such a good idea to me.

Which is how the capital of San Palmero came to be called Bubbles La Tour.

“Bubbles La Tour?” repeated Consuela, frowning. “What is a Bubbles La Tour?”

“An entertainer whose skills and artistry I came to admire on Saturday nights back when I was growing up in Moline, Illinois,” I said.

“An ecdysiast?” said Raquel.

“Gesundheit,” I said. “Now, what’s on the presidential agenda for the rest of the day?”

“We haven’t had electricity for the past 48 hours,” said Consuela. “I think getting the power on again is the first order of business.”

“Yes,” added Maria. “It is especially bad on the west side of town, where they haven’t had any lights for weeks now.”

“What’s on the west side of town?” I asked.

“The worst and most dangerous slums in all of San Palmero,” she answered.

This problem wasn’t quite as easy as the last one, but I mulled on it while I was puffing away at my cigar, and in about five minutes the answer came to me.

“Okay,” I announced. “I got this here conundrum solved too.”

“What are your orders, Presidente?” asked Consuela.

“Set fire to the slums,” I said. “We’ll get rid of an eyesore and give the people something to read by, all at the same time.”

“That will only last for one night,” she pointed out.

“One night’s all it should take to get the power on again,” I said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Find the richest folks what ain’t left town yet,” I told her, “and tomorrow morning spread the word that people can read their evening papers by the light of their blazing houses if someone don’t pony up enough money to get the electricity running again.”

“You know,” said Maria, “it’s not a bad idea at that.”

“And it would get rid of the slums,” agreed Raquel.

Consuela stared long and hard at me. “I’m beginning to know how Baron von Frankenstein felt,” she said.

“If he felt anything but hungry, I ain’t got much in common with him,” I said. “When do they serve dinner around here?”

We moseyed over to the dining room, which wasn’t much smaller than the office and was set up to accommodate small intimate groups of two hundred or so, and Raquel went off to see if any servants were left or if they’d all high-tailed it to the hills. She came back a few minutes later and announced that the men were all dead or run off, but that we still had a passel of employees of the female persuasion, and she’d told some of ’em to put some grub on the fire.

Well, truth to tell, I don’t know which looked more appetizing, the food or the young ladies what brung it out and served it. In fact, there was so much of it that I invited them all to join us, and after dinner I sent a couple of ’em off to the presidential wine cellar to bring back a few gallons of San Palmero’s finest drinkin’ stuff, and somewhere around midnight it occurred to me that Bubbles La Tour wasn’t actually a resident of the country, and that I had an even better notion for naming the city, depending on who I woke up with each morning.

I stood up, waited for silence (which can be a long time coming when you’re keeping company with forty or fifty women) and then issued a Presidential Proclamation concerning the daily re-naming of the city.

“But Presidente!” protested a particularly lovely young maiden with long black hair. “We are all married!”

“Just so long as you ain’t fanatics about it,” I said.

“It would be a sin,” she said.

“I talk to the Lord all the time,” I assured her, “and He tells me that it ain’t no mortal sin, but just one of them little venereal ones that He don’t pay much attention to.”

“We could not consider it.”

“Just because you’re married?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Okay,” I said. “That don’t pose no lasting problem.”

“It doesn’t?” said another. “Why not?”

I snapped my fingers. “Presto!” I said. “You’re all legally divorced by Presidential Decree.”

“You can’t do that!” protested Consuela.

“A president’s got more powers than the captain of a ship, don’t he?” I said. “And if a captain can marry folks, then I don’t see why I can’t un-marry them.”

“It’s not in the constitution.”

“The constitution’s in the repair shop, remember?” I said. Then I looked around the table. “Okay, who’s interested in having a whole city named after her first thing in the morning?”

I could see each of them was giving serious consideration to cementing her place in San Palmero’s history. Finally one of them said, “Well, he’s not quite as ugly as Riccardo.”

A sizeable portion of the assemblage took issue with that remark and began arguing it. I thunk the two sides was going to come to blows for a while there, but then suddenly some gunshots rang out and a couple of windows shattered and one of the chandeliers got shot down.

“I thought you told me all the husbands were dead or hiding!” I hollered as I dove under the table.

Raquel and Maria ran to the busted windows and started shooting back, while a number of the young ladies joined me. It struck me as a propitious time to get to know the hired help a bit better, which I was in the process of doing when Consuela finally stuck her head under the table.

“You can come out now, Presidente,” she said.

“I’m comfortable right where I am,” I answered.

“But it’s safe now,” said Consuela.

“It’s safer down here,” I said as one of my new acquaintances proved to be more ticklish than I expected and began giggling, “to say nothing of friendlier.”

But then the young ladies started climbing to their feet, and I figured I might as well stand up too, just to set a brave example. I wandered over to the window and looked down on the front lawn, where I saw a bunch of corpses in dresses sprawled across the grass.

“Either we got some women campaigning for the presidency,” I announced, “or you ladies are married to the most peculiar batch of husbands I ever did see.”

“They are women,” said one of the young ladies. “They are sick and tired of the mess men have made of this country and have decided to take it over themselves.”

“Can’t they think of nothing better to do with their time than storm the presidential palace?” I complained.

“Such as?” she said.

“Cooking. Sewing. Cleaning. Having babies. All the things women are good at.”

“So you think women are not good at anything but housework?” said Consuela ominously.

“Now don’t you go putting words in my mouth,” I said angrily. “I think Bubbles La Tour was one of the most remarkable women I ever met, and I’ll lay plenty of eight-to-five that she didn’t know one end of a broom from another.” Which wasn’t exactly true, as I was in the front row of the 5-Star Rialto Burlesque the night they arrested her precisely because she proved she
did
know one end from the other, but I didn’t see no reason to be so nit-picky.

“I have the distinct impression that you don’t appreciate the members of my sex,” said Consuela.

“That’s a lie!” I said hotly. “No matter where I am I visit the local red light district and appreciate the bejabbers out of ’em every time I got a couple of extra dollars in my pocket!”

I noticed a kind of angry murmuring starting to gain steam among the other women.

“This was your doing, Consuela,” said one of them accusingly.

“Right,” said another. “You were the one who chose him.”

“What could I do?” said Consuela. “He’s all that was left. All the rest of the men have fled.”

“Maybe that’s not the worst of all possible worlds, given the quality of the male presidents San Palmero has had lately,” suggested Maria.

“Now that I see him clearly,” added Raquel, “he’s really much uglier than Riccardo.”

“Now just hold your horses a minute!” I said. “I’m El Presidente, and I don’t take kindly to grumbling in the ranks! If I hear any more of it you risk running head-on into my righteous executive wrath.”

Suddenly I was staring down the barrel of Consuela’s pistol.

“And you risk running head-on into a bullet,” she said.

I looked around the room, and found to my surprise that I was facing maybe forty or fifty guns and rifles.

“I got another Presidential Decree,” I announced. “Anyone who drops her gun and leaves the room gets a ten percent raise in pay, effective a week from next Tuesday.”

Nobody moved.

“Tax free,” I added.

Still no one moved.

“Okay,” I said. “I ain’t nothing if not magnanimous. We’ll let bygones be bygones. Now, who wants the city to bear her name starting tomorrow morning?”