Taft 2012 (17 page)

Taft licked the astringent sweetness from the tips of his fledgling whiskers and sighed.

“What’s the matter? You’re not getting sick again, are you?” Kowalczyk was staring at him and misinterpreting his downcast expression. The agent rooted around in the pocket on the back of the seat in front of him and drew out a paper sack.

“What did you call that again?” Taft asked as Kowalczyk popped the sack open.

“Barf bag.”

“Ah, yes. Barf bag. The eloquence of the twenty-first century never ceases to astound me. See, Kowalczyk? This is why I need you to accompany me on my travels. How could I possibly survive in this dazzling new world without knowing the proper nomenclature of the barf bag?”

Kowalczyk made a face at him. “Someone has to teach you the basics of survival while Professor Weschler is teaching you all the complicated stuff.”

Taft looked around to make sure Susan hadn’t returned to her seat yet—how could anyone, no matter their size, squeeze into those infernally small airplane bathrooms, anyway?—and leaned his forehead against the cold pane of the window. “Susan is a dear woman, a learned scholar, and, all in all, a good friend. But I must say … I cannot quite forget that she jots down all that I do and it will end up in a book eventually.” Kowalczyk smiled faintly, and suddenly Taft felt a chill run through his body. “Kowalczyk. You aren’t going to write a book about me, are you?”

The agent snorted. “I ought to say yes—that’s what you get for insisting your Secret Service agent do double duty as your confidante. No, Mr. President, sir, I intend to devote all my attention to guarding your ass for a long time to come. I’ll let other people worry about analyzing it.”

When they landed, Rachel was there to meet them, a staff aide in tow. They drove to a nearby diner, one of these gleaming fortresses of greasiness that calls itself Denny’s, and, as Taft squeezed through the narrow aisles between tables, he saw Trevor and Abby waiting for them at a large booth. His heart leapt at the sight of his great-great-granddaughter; this would be her one visit to the
campaign trail, since her parents were determined to preserve her normal life at home with her father as much as possible while Rachel split the season between stumping with Taft and fulfilling her legislative duties on Capitol Hill.

With a prudence he was proud to muster, Taft poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot on the table and gulped it down before wedging himself into the booth—a laborious process that, he noticed with a scowl, amused the nearby tables to no end. “Damned shoddy construction,” he muttered, then poured himself another cup of coffee. He could already feel himself sobering up. Oh, Nellie would have had a mouthful to say about his occasional nip at the bottle. Prohibition was nothing but a dim, distant memory to this nation—although, Taft had to admit, what he’d seen of the country’s current legislation against recreational pharmaceuticals was no less misguided and ineffectual. He turned to Abby, hoping the coffee had sufficiently masked the booze on his breath.

“So, what’s new with you, young lady?”

She stared at him sternly. “Grandpa, you got bigger.”

“Ah, well, yes. More of me to love and all that, wouldn’t you say? Speaking of which, unless I’m mistaken, you’ve gotten taller.”

“How can you tell? I’m sitting down.”

“Your daughter doesn’t miss a thing, does she?” he said to Trevor.

Trevor smiled. “Well, she is a Collins. And a Taft.”

Just then, the waitress came by with a handful of massive menus. Taft opened his and stared at the glorious selection of savory riches detailed therein.

All in all, Taft decided, the twin thrills of whiskey and coffee stimulating his blood, this trip was starting out swimmingly.

T
he rallies in delaware and West Virginia had been warm-ups. The ones in Kansas and Wyoming had been surprisingly comfortable. And now, as he stood on the raised platform in the middle of this weathered county fairground and waved happily to satisfying applause from the fine people of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Taft felt a surge of the grudging, nervous excitement that he’d first experienced while stumping in 1908. He glanced to his left, where Rachel sat beaming; she was feeling it, too.

“As you can see,” he said, his voice booming through the speakers as he gestured to the huge red, white, and blue banners that hung behind him, “great effort has been taken to today to make me appear presidential.” A good-hearted laugh ran through the crowd. “Suffice it to say, I never have. But I take that as a good thing.” He paused for a moment as if expecting to be challenged, but the only sound he could hear was the wind whistling through the nearby trees. “America, and please correct me if I’m wrong, is a democracy, which is much more than a mere political apparatus. At its core, it
was intended to be the triumph, the apotheosis, of the people. No despots or tyrants or plutocrats, but people.” A light smattering of applause filled the silence as Taft squared his shoulders. “But I’m not here to reaffirm some image of myself as a common man. Clearly, I am no such thing. In fact, unlike so many of my opponents on both sides of the big-ticket coin, I’m not here to talk about myself at all. I’m here to talk about you.

“You are America. You are a piece of it, and you are the whole of it. And so is your neighbor. Whoever stands next to you is a part of your existence, as is the person who stands halfway across the country. No part of this country works properly if any part of it is failing, just as no body is healthy if even the smallest cell of it is ill. An entire symphony becomes discordant at the creation of one wrong note. And my opponents have been blowing quite a few of them lately.”

The crowd seemed to stir, forgoing a laugh at Taft’s obvious punch line in anticipation of his point. They were here to witness a spectacle, a happening, a moment—and, by God, he’d give them one.

“And just as no man, woman, or child in this country is truly healthy if his neighbor is not, so it goes with two of mankind’s most basic needs: sustenance and education. Trust me, I am well acquainted with both. And I also know, in the essential matters of food and schools, that quantity and quality are not interchangeable. What’s that saying you have these days? ‘Garbage in, garbage out’? For too long, I have come to understand, America has been content to let those in power—the would-be dictators of both the public and private sectors—feed you garbage. This garbage is presented in many forms: lower wages for public school teachers. Political and corporate pressures on curricula. Reckless agribusiness. Relaxed standards and regulations of the food industry. And then there’s the intersection of the two problems: the toxic crossroads we call
student lunch. It may seem a small thing, granted, in the grand scheme of this vast nation. But if you want to look at one of the major roots of the lack of self-reliance and the lack of self-regard in this country, look no further. Again, I speak from experience. And if elected, I will not allow such circumstance to stand. It is long past time for the Department of Education to be recognized as one of the most important entities in the entire federal government!”

Taft paused to allow the crowd a chance to respond. He was greeted with a shuffling of feet. A phone rang. Some pro-Taft signs previously held highly and proudly seemed to dip and wobble with indecision.

Time seemed to crawl. He’d known this was going to be a hard sell in an America obsessed with terrorism and rampant unemployment and partisan squabbles, but he had to play his own game. Or rather: he had to play no game at all.

A hand shot up in the third row, and Taft gestured magnanimously in its direction. It was a man—a fat man of perhaps forty, Taft saw, as round as himself though certainly not as tall, wearing thick eyeglasses and sporting an unshaven face.

“So, Mr. Taft,” the man sneered. “You say that the Department of Education holds the key to America’s future. But there was no such department in the presidential cabinet when you were alive, was there, Mr. Taft? Why should you place such weight on a bureaucracy you couldn’t possibly know anything about?”

Ah. A heckler. One of those malcontents who’d already decided to shout without listening in return. Taft knew the type well, and they made him cringe. Even when he held the highest office in the land, he’d always striven to appease both sides of any conflict, to compromise and find equitable resolution wherever possible. After all, it appealed to his sense of justice and fairness, the same sense that, early in his career, had led him toward becoming
a judge. More than that, though, he’d always been sensitive to the sting of scorn, no matter how slight or even imagined; he always felt guilty when confronted by one of these closed-minded mockers, for surely their misunderstanding arose from his own failure to explain himself successfully. Nellie used to scold him for it. She assumed being president would grow him a thicker hide. He patted his gut, all those extra pounds he’d packed on since being elected, and again since awakening a hundred years later. He smiled sadly. A thicker hide, indeed.

“I say, sir, it is true that, in my day, the Office of Education was a minor entity in the Interior Department. But although its increased size today doubtless holds some inefficiencies, I find no fault with its enlarged mandate to help educate America’s children. How can we face the future, sir, without teaching our young people all they can possibly know?” He turned to call upon another raised hand, but the fat man shouted back at him.

“You’re full of shit! You don’t sound like William Howard Taft! You aren’t William Howard Taft! You’re a freaking hoax, and everyone with a brain has got to know it!” His eyes wild, the man suddenly leveled a large, black pistol in Taft’s direction.

Then several things happened at once.

As Taft, his imagination long sharpened by the keen awareness that both McKinley and Roosevelt had faced bullets from their constituents, hurled himself sideways to shield Rachel from harm, she did the exact same thing, and the two of them crashed into each other and fell to the stage while, Taft saw out of the corner of his eye, Kowalczyk went flying through the air, over the heads of the first two rows of the crowd, and tackled the fat man in a messy heap.

“Are you all right?” Rachel yelled.

“Unharmed,” Taft coughed.

“Stay down,” she said. As people swarmed around them, they
turned to look toward the scuffle.

Kowalczyk stood up, the man’s gun in his hand and the man under the agent’s foot. “It’s not real,” he shouted. “It’s a toy gun. It’s a fake.”

The fat man began cackling. “It’s as real as he is!” he shouted, pointing at Taft. “It’s every bit as real as he is!”

T
aft closed his eyes to shut out the sight of Kowalczyk pacing furiously around their hotel suite. The man was barking instructions into his service radio, and it was giving Taft a headache. Slowly, however, he became aware that his bodyguard was calling for a larger contingent of agents to be dispatched to the campaign, and Taft stood up and motioned furiously for silence. Kowalczyk finished the call and drilled his eyes into Taft’s. “What’s wrong?”

“Please, Kowalczyk. No additional security! I know fretting about it is your job, but I’m already trapped in this entire century I never asked for. I don’t need the walls around me to be even tighter than they have been!”

“Bill. Mr. President, sir. We can’t keep allowing you to be so vulnerable. I already can’t believe I went along with your crazy two-man vacation thing, and that nothing worse happened then. Today was a long overdue wake-up call.”

“Nonsense! And what matter if I
had
been shot, I ask you. I’m living a charmed second life already. Every day is gravy.”

“Are you nuts? That’s exactly why we can’t let anything happen to you!” The agent stumbled over his words. “I mean, you know, on top of the fact that you’re our friend, Bill. You’re—you’re a one of a kind miracle. We can’t have William Howard Taft magically come back to life and just let him get killed again!”

“Anachronism or not, Kowalczyk, time traveler or not, I am indeed just another man. And don’t forget, I used to travel the country extensively while I was president. And not just in the course of campaigning! I snuck out of the White House every chance I could get, and for as long as I could get away with.”

“Yeah,” Kowalczyk sighed, “you may have mentioned that a few dozen times while we were driving to Chicago. How in hell did you pull it off, anyway?”

“It was a different time then. We had the Secret Service, of course, but even with a recent assassination on our minds—McKinley—security was far less overweening than it is now. Perhaps it was the very fact that we hadn’t yet invented all your new technological miracles, but it simply never occurred to us to even
try
to fortify every moment of our lives from harm. I’d accept invitations to anything and everything—commencement ceremonies, graduations, ribbon-cuttings, even the bar mitzvah of the son of an old colleague or college chum—just to get out of the that maddening, oppressive Oval Office.” He chuckled. “And I’d take my sweet time getting there and returning. My critics called me a tramp, and I always chalked it up to wanderlust. In actuality, though, I was running away from that damnable cage.”

“But didn’t you get hassled constantly? Not just by random people, but by the press? I mean, we’ve had a recent president who spent way more time on vacation than he should have. But he was almost always hiding out at his ranch. The idea of a sitting president just up and roaming around America whenever he felt like it—it’s
just a logistical nightmare.”

“That’s the Secret Service man in you talking, not the Ira Kowalczyk who likes to flail his body around to the strains of banshees holding electrified guitars. Really, Kowalczyk, don’t be paranoid.”

The agent blinked at him. “You are saying that to a man who just tackled a loonie who could have been pointing a gun at you from the middle of a crowd. Hell, what am I even talking about—you’re saying it to a man who
shot you myself
not six months ago, because you just suddenly turned up somewhere you had no business being.”