Public Burning (70 page)

“I'll second that!” affirms Uncle Sam, striding out onto the Death House stage, tipping his top hat, jabbing his finger at the multitudes in that gesture of his beloved by all Americans, draftees sometimes excepted. The people crammed into Times Square roar their welcome. “Thank you, friends and neighbors! Thank you very—!”

“The Lord lift up His countenance unto thee,” the people cry, their hands raised in praise and supplication, like bank tellers caught in a raid by audacious and handsome bandidos, “and accept the sweet savor of thy sacrifices!”

“Thanks! I'm sure He—”

“The Lord lift up His banner—”

“All right, that's enough now, the shades of night ‘re—”

“…and do battle for thee at the head of thy thousands against this iniquitous generation! The Lord lift up His—”

“SHUT PAN AND SING DUMB, YOU BEAUTIES, BEFORE I REAR BACK AND WHOP AN INIQUITOUS BELCH OUTA YA SHARP ENOUGH TO STICK A PIG WITH!” Uncle Sam's steely blue eyes are flashing, his red bow tie is standing on end, and his teeth are showing white as hoarfrost in a powerful mean grin. “WHEE-EE-O! I don't care how much a man talks, if he only says it in a few words! It's like the monkey remarked tryin' to stuff the cork back in the elephant's asshole:
A little shit goes a long way!
LISTEN TO ME! Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me? Size me up and shudder, you scalawags! The power to tax involves the power to
destroy
, and don't you forget it! I am the Thunderer, Justice the Avenger, kin to the whoopin' cough on my mother's side and half brother to the Abominable Snowman, a wonder, a grandeur, and a
woe!
WHOO-OOP! I am in earnest! I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch; and
I will be heard!”

There is a moment of awed silence—then the crowd bursts into a tumultuous frenzy of applause, whistling, wild cheering.

Uncle Sam grins, stuffs his hands in his back pockets, and rocks back and forth on the stage, acknowledging the cheers and winking at folks he recognizes. “All right, then,” he bellows, stilling the roar, “get a muzzle on your passions there, you cockabillies! I know, nothin' great was ever achieved without enthusiasm, like the Prophet says, but now the day is done, and the darkness falls from the wings o' Night, as a feather is wafted downward from a eagle in his fright—flight, I mean—so we gotta get crackin', children! We gotta beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly, we gotta ring down the curtain, men's hearts wait upon us, men's lives hang in the balance—you
hear?
We gotta bring the flamin' Jubilee before the hills conceal the setting sun and stars begin a-peepin' one by one!” Uncle Sam clamps his corncob pipe in his jaws, withdraws a match from behind his ear, and holds it halfway between the two electrodes on the electric chair—sparks fly and ignite the match, which he cups over the bowl of his pipe. “The law,” he hollers, blowing blue smoke: “it has honored us; may we honor it!”

“Ya-HOO!”

“That's tellin' 'em, Uncle Sam!”

“Hit 'em where they ain't!”

“Hey, it's really wonderful to see so many of you here tonight!” beams Uncle Sam. “It's the biggest crowd since the hangin' at Mount Holly in Aught-Thirty-three! And lemme say right here and now, it's you ordinary folks who've made this show possible tonight! If I might quote our elusive Vice President, where'er the hairy li'l tyke might be—” a ripple of consternation passes through the crowd at this news, if news is what it was—“‘God musta loved the common people, he made so many of 'em!' And I might add, He did a tolerable fine job of it, too!”

The people applaud themselves enthusiastically, Uncle Sam joining in. His handclaps crack and pop like rifle fire through the city streets.

“And I see a heap o' folks
not
so common, too! Yes, there's Vince Astor out there! And Charley Merrill! Jack Rockefeller—hullo, Junior! Give the folks a wave there—can you put a spot on him? We wouldn't be here without him! Jack Rockefeller, everybody!” Uncle Sam pauses for a burst of cheering, waves at others he recognizes, tips his top hat to the ladies (underneath his hat he's wearing one of those Dr. T beanies from the Dr. Seuss movie, and when he tips his hat, the yellow rubber fingers make naughty gestures to the ladies): “H'lo, Dinah! Duke! Dottie! Glad you could come! And there's Jonny Wainwright and Old Man Tose and Artie Sulzberger—and whoa! I see Billy Faulkner, our Nobel Prize-winning mythomaniac! Howdy, Bill!”

“How do you do, suh!”

“How about a few dozen immortal words for us tonight, you old blatherskite?”

“Mah pleasure, suh! What about? Drinkin' or huntin' or—?”

“About God, Billy! About God and the Phantom and the chosen people!”

“Waal… In the beginnin', uh… God created the earth…”

“That's pretty good…”

“Then He created man completely equipped to cope with the earth.… Then God stopped.”

“He stopped?”

“Yuh see, God didn't merely believe in man, He
knew
man. He knew thet man was competent fer a soul cuz he was capable of savin' thet soul—and not only his soul but hisself…”

“Himself?”

“Yes,
suh!
He knew thet man was capable of teachin' hisself to be civilized. It ain't only man's high destiny, but proof of his immortality, too, thet his is the choice between endin' the world…and completin' it!”

“Aha! A lofty bit of talknophical assumnancy there, Billy—but what about the Phantom?”

“The dark incorrigible one, yuh mean, who possessed the arrogance and pride to demand with, and the temerity to object with, and the ambition to substitute with…and the long roster of ruthless avatars—Genghis and Caesar and Stalin and Bonaparte and Huey Long—”

This mention of the Kingfish gets a big cheer. “That's whom I mean, okay,” says Uncle Sam, stoking up his corncob pipe. “But what do we do about him, Billy? What do we do about the goddamn Phantom?”

“The answer's very simple, suh,” says Faulkner, stroking his moustache. “Ah don't mean easy, but simple… It begins et home.”

“At home?” Uncle Sam blows a smoke ring that floats out to hover over the Nobel laureate like a halo.

“Yup. Let us think fust of savin' the integer we call home: not whur
Ah
live, but whur
we
live: a thousand then tens of thousands of little integers scattered and fixed firmer and more impregnable and more solid then rocks or citadels about the earth, so thet the ruthless and ambitious split-offs of the ancient Dark Spirit shall look and say, ‘There is nothin' fer us here… Man—simple, unfrightened, invincible men and women—has beaten us!'”

“Sweet Genevieve, Bill! that's pretty highfalutin' sesquipedalian advice! When I think on this majestic jazz, mine eyes dazzle! And that word ‘integer' was a jimdandy, too! Let's give him a hand, folks, he's a good ole boy! And pass him a bottle a redeye! That's right, on the house, nothin' too good for an old Massassip screamer—that boy can head-rassle with the worst of 'em! All them little integers swarmin' around—WHOOPEE! you gotta be born and reared up in the swamps to think 'em up like that!” He gives a puff and the smoke halo over Faulkner's head disintegrates with a little tinkle into a sprinkle of gold dust.

While out front, Uncle Sam picks out more celebrities in the roving spots and hands out foot-long panatellas in appreciation to all those who've helped make tonight's show possible, backstage consternation over the missing Vice President is growing. Some think he might have been assassinated. Others that he's been kidnapped, or else overslept. Or got picked up as a derelict—those who saw him on the train report that he was looking pretty scruffy. Or maybe the Phantom's got him! Even as, from back in the wings and down in the subway station, they join Uncle Sam, the Singing Saints, and all the citizens out in the Square in singing a special Happy Birthday on this 19th of June to the Duchess of Dreamland, Bessie Wallis Warfield of Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, they are thinking: Somebody may have to take his place. Maybe it's me.

Uncle Sam hugs the birthday girl, feet dangling, high off the boards (the Duchess struggles, smiling gamely, to keep her skirt from rucking up over her knees, while out in the crowd, the Duke squirms uncomfortably among his whooping and hollering in-laws), then sets her down, roughs up her hair playfully, and presents her with one of Betty Crocker's giant angelfood birthday cakes. Amid the huzzahs and many happy returns, Uncle Sam spots the British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill—he coaxes Winnie, who is often confused in the American imagination with W. C. Fields, into coming up on the stage to belt out a few boomers from the Golden Age of the Finest Hour. The P.M. squares his shoulders, winks puckishly, ducks his fat chin in his chest, snorts like a bull, paws the ground with his spatted hooves, jumps up once and cracks his heels together, and with the dignity of pink-cheeked greatness about him commences to bellow like a bona fide blueblood: “Cor blimey! the crisis is upon us, an iron curtain has descended on the broad sunlit uplands, and like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along beyond the soft underbelly of space and time! In the past we have a light which flickered, in the present”—here he raps the chair with his walking stick and whips out a new cigar—“we have a light that flames, so do not let us speak of -darker days, death and sorrow, the quivering, precarious sinews of peace, blood, toil, tears, and bloody ‘ell, God save the Queen,
upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization!
DREAD NOUGHT! When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite, short words are best! Now this is not the end, everyone has his day and some days last longer than others, it is not even the beginning of the end…”

But while he's blustering like that, Uncle Sam is filling the stage behind him and secret corners of the VIP section with Minutemen and Green Mountain Boys—suddenly they leap out and point their muskets at Winnie: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,'” they cry, spitting tobacco juice and flourishing buckets of tar and feathers, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,
and to institute new Government!”

“What? What?” roars Churchill. He puts two fingers in his mouth and lets rip a deafening whistle. People hear troops marching, singing “Yankee Doodle”—they open up to let them pass through—but wait! they're not Americans after all, they're Redcoats! A Patriot comes loping up ahead of them, slapping his thigh, hippety-hopping as though galloping in on an imaginary horse: it's Paul Revere! He warns the Minutemen, and they fall into defensive formations against the attackers. “Stand your ground! Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war let it begin here!” There's musket fire! Screams! Eight Minutemen drop dead! The Redcoats march on into the center, led by the likes of Hair-Buyer Hamilton, Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, and Lord Cornwallis, strutting like peacocks! George Washington organizes his forces and a full-scale free-for-all breaks out! Rhetoric is flying through the air like musket fire: “The die is now cast,” bellows Churchill, popping his buttons with excitement and looking for all the world like John Bull himself, “the Colonies must either submit or triumph!”

“There's something absurd in supposin' a Continent to be perpetually governed by an island!” snorts Uncle Sam. “Come on, boys! From the East to the West blow the trumpet to treason and make the most of it! Now is the seedtime of Continental union, faith and the clash of resounding arms, the original Merrycunt Revilusion! I know not what chorus others may take, but as for me, stick a feather in your girl and call her Maggie Rooney! Whee-oo! I must fight somethin' or I'll ketch the dry rot—burnt brandy won't save me! C'mon, you varmints, the harder the conflict, the more glorious the massacree! Laxation without intoxification is tyranny, so give me Molly Stark or liberty sleeps a widder!”

Blood is splattering everywhere. Washington's tattered troops shrink to a shivering handful. But the old vestryman of Truro Parish gathers them into a make-believe ark and, invoking Divine Providence, they paddle across one of the aisles in the VIP section and take the wassailing intruders by surprise. “A race of convicts—a pack of rascals, sir!” storms Churchill. “They are a set of tatterdemalions, there is hardly a whole pair of breeches in an entire regiment! Bugger the lot!” But it's not to be: the swamp foxes and backwoodsmen scatter through the forest of VIP seats and pick off the Redcoats like sleeping coons, teaching Burgoyne and Cornwallis with buckshot to their retreating rears the fundamentals of guerrilla warfare. “All right, then,” says the P.M., reaching inside his siren suit to scratch his distinguished ballocks, “we have been subdued.”

Cheers erupt through the Square and beyond as Uncle Sam unveils the stone tablets of the Constitution, said to be the same ones that George Washington brought down off Bunkum Hill. All the “dead” soldiers get up and sing “Yankee Doodle” together, then step back to help guard the perimeter of the VIP area. Winston Churchill and Uncle Sam pick each other's pockets clean, and Winnie is sent off, amid wild cheering, Uncle Sam's Dr. T beanie on his head, its yellow rubber fingers flashing his famous V-for-Victory sign.

Then George Washington, the American Fabius, so-called, brushes himself off and leads out all the other Presidents: His Rotundity the Machiavelli of Massachusetts, Long Tom the Sage of Monticello, Withered Little Apple-John, the Last of the Cocked Hats, Old Man Eloquent, King Andrew, Little Van the Red Fox of Kinderhook, Old Tippecanoe and Turncoat Tyler, too, Young Hickory the Sly, Old Rough and Ready, the American Louis Philippe, Yankee Purse, Old Buck the Bachelor, the Illinois Baboon, Sir Veto, the Butcher, the Fraud of ‘77 and his wife Lemonade Lucy, the Evangelist, the Gentleman Boss, the Stuffed Prophet, Cold Ben, Prosperity's Advance Agent, Tiddy the Bull Moose, High-Tariffs Fats, Dr. God-on-the-Mountain, the Mainstreeter with the Soft Heart, the American Primitive, the Great Humanitarian, Old Again and Again and Again, and Give 'em Hell Harry. As they emerge, wearing their shiny papier-mâché heads modeled from official portraits, they're accompanied by iconic figures from the epochs they represent: Pilgrims, Pirates, Planters and Pioneers, Boston Merchants, Virginia Orators, Inventors, Southern Gentlemen and their Darkies, Canal Boatmen, Land Speculators, Powder Monkeys and Brave Engineers, Pony Express Riders, Bible Belters, Village Blacksmiths and Forty-Niners, Raftsmen and Dirt Farmers, Roving Gamblers, Lumberjacks, Johnny Rebs and Damyankees, Sheepherders and Cattle Kings, River Boat Captains, Desert Rats, Millionaires, Whalers, Cowboys and Indians and the U.S. Cavalry, Carpetbaggers and Ku Klux Klansmen, Country Fiddlers, Coalminers, Oil Barons and Outlaws, Bluebloods and Rednecks, Wall Streeters, Suffragettes, Rough Riders, Motorists, Movie Stars and Moonshiners, Stockbrokers, Shortstops and Traveling Salesmen, Gangbusters, Quarterbacks, Songwriters, Private Eyes, Self-Made Men, and more, all doing skits, singing songs, dancing in chorus lines, miming the high drama of building a nation and taking over the world. A lot of the performers are as stiff-kneed and self-conscious as those of any home-town centennial pageant—many of them are Secret Service agents in disguise and ambitious amateurs with influential relatives—but the acts flow in and over one another so fast there's no time to notice, all watched over by a ceaselessly inventive and unpredictable Uncle Sam, who's out there stirring up a veritable feast of Train Robberies, Famous Debates, Lynchings, Brawls, and Dust Storms, and carrying on his running patter of Yankee proverbs and prophecies, the Singing Saints humming gospel songs in the background.