Public Burning (44 page)

“Step on
what
, mac?” growled the cabdriver, rolling around to glare sourly at me. Ugly man, hard, looked foreign. Pimply, unshaven, thick dirty glasses, fat lips.

I glared back at him, keeping my cool, then hauled the door shut, but it was loose on its hinges and it just whumped up heavily against the frame and swung open again. People had turned to stare at us, some seemed to recognize me, they were moving toward the cab. I grabbed the door with both hands and yanked it hard—it slammed to with a crumping smashing noise, and the window dropped three inches, a crack branching through it like a pencil drawing of a tree.

“Nice goin', big shot,” said the driver drily. “Ya broke it. That'll cost ya five bucks.” He stuck out his hand at me, grubby, short-fingered. “Right now, or we don't go
no
where.”

I sighed irritably. Trick window, I supposed, I was just getting taken, but what could I do about it? This was the only cab in sight and I did not want to get out there with those people again. I reached into my pocket for my billfold, pulled out a five-dollar bill. The Raft movie was over and I was into something more familiar.

He snatched the bill out of my hand with a grin, started to swing around, then turned back, wrinkled his nose, sniffed, winced at me: “Is that you makin' that smell, chief?”

“I… I stepped in…something,” I explained.

“Yeah? Well, that'll be another five bucks,” he said, and whipped another bill out of my wallet—it looked like a ten.

“Hey, wait a minute,” I said, but he had already pitched around, shifted gears, gunned the motor, honked the horn, and was moving aggressively into the crowd. To hell with it. Cut your losses. I could probably get it back out of my office expense fund.

“Say, what's the high muckey-mucks doin' in there,” he asked, scowling and shaking his fist at the crowds that clotted the streets, “givin' away free nookie?”

“The atom spies,” I replied stiffly. “The, uh, President is delivering his—”

“You mean Eisenhower?” he shouted back over his shoulder. “Hey, I hear Mamie's askin' for a divorce!”

“A divorce—? No, I—”

“Yeah, she says she's gettin' sick 'n' tired of him doin' to the country all the time what he oughta be doin' to her! Haw haw haw!”

Ah, screw the pulse of the nation, I thought, sitting back, scraping the horseshit off my shoe on the back of the seat in front. The cab was edging slowly around past the Ellipse, General Sherman rearing up on my left like his pants were on fire, lumpen pioneers and the Washington obelisk holding the right. Washington had got the obelisk, Jefferson the dome and circle, Lincoln the cube, what was there left for me? I wondered. The pyramid maybe. Something modern and Western would be more appropriate, but all I could think of were the false fronts in the old cowtowns.

“Hey, speakin' a horse manure,” the driver hollered, lurching and braking through the milling crowds, “Harry Truman got in trouble with his daughter about that! Margaret come to her old lady and complained that Harry had disgraced the family by sayin' ‘manure' insteada ‘fertilizer' when he come to present the prizes at her Ladies' Horticultural Club. ‘Hell,' says Bess, ‘that's okay, it's took me thirty years to get him to say manure!'”

I humph-humphed ambivalently. A stupid joke, but it was enough to remind me that I had my own speech to think about: should I take the high road or the low road? I ran over some phrases in my mind: uh, peace in the world…reduce the danger… I cannot and will not, uh, I have determined that, reached the conclusion…uh, with the help of a mobilized public opinion…what I am suggesting, just running it out hypothetically, is that, uh, some very strong medicine…getting down frankly into the arena…moving upward strongly…

“Bess, ya know, has decided to become a model! Ycah, now that Harry's out of a job, she's gonna he a model for dowager styles, see? A friend asked her: ‘But whaddaya gonna do about that big ass o' yours, Bess?' And she says: ‘Oh, he'll stay home on the farm!' Hoo hah!”

Ah, some of our good partisans…many decent, uh, decent Americans…gathered here…something about, let's see, we must, uh, we must seize the moment, yes, not just cosmetics, but…ah, on the brink, yes, I think we would he less than candid were we not to admit…

“I got three little girls, ya know—well, they ain't so little any more, in fact they just got married the other day. All on the same day, a cute idea!”

“Oh? Yes…yes, it is…” I could get a lot fancier, of course. But people have known me too long for me to come on all of a sudden talking like Adlai Stevenson. If I'm to convince people, it'll he in simple declarative sentences, by the force of facts.

“Yeah, and they all spent their first night in my house, see? When they come down to breakfast the next morning, I ask 'em, I says: ‘Honey, whaddaya think o' married life?' Well, the first one, she says: ‘Daddy, with my husband it was just like Winston Churchill, all blood, sweat, and tears!' And the second one, she says: ‘My old man was like Roosevelt, I thought I'd never get him out—four times, before he finally died on me!'”

Roosevelt had a lot of style, all right, I thought as the cabbie jerked and wormed through the crowds. I wondered if there was something of his I could borrow for tonight. Maybe a variation on that four-freedoms idea—the freedom of the modern housewife, for example, or the freedom to hear Ike pray at the Inauguration, the freedom of television, and so on. Work the Rosenbergs in somewhere maybe. The main thing, though, was: keep it short and blunt, sound a warning note or two, and tell 'em what they want to hear. My greatest weakness was getting over-intellectual in my speeches. I'm known as an activist and an organizer, but some people have said I'm sort of an egghead in the Republican Party. It's true, I'm more on the thought side than the action side—I'm like Wilson in that regard, except that he always overdid it. I know how to avoid that, I can tame and coddle the intellectual Dillingers as easily as I can outsmart the double domes….

“So I asked the third one, ‘Well, what about you, honey?' And she says, ‘Well, mine was just like Harry Truman, Daddy. He wanted out before he'd ever got in, then when he did get in, he didn't know what to do there. Finally, he just rolled over and quit, and when I asked him why, he says: “Lady, the fuck stops here!”' Haw haw haw!”

Well, at least it wasn't about me, I thought. My shoe seemed to be caught under the front seat. Shoestring snagged or something. As I twisted it back and forth, trying to get it free, it suddenly came to me that the roller coaster in my dream last night had not been a roller coaster at all, but one of those rides they call an Octopus, and it had had a sign on it that said MOSAIC OF HISTORY. Funny how dreams kept developing after you'd dreamt them… I seemed to remember that little Ethel was wearing an “A” on her chest, too. And that she looked a lot like my first girlfriend back in Whittier. Maybe because of Sheriff Street…my girlfriend's old man was the local chief of police…

The cabbie, leaning on the horn, hulled his way around a bus, through an onrush of latecomers pouring over from the Hill, and suddenly we were free, shooting up toward the old Willard Hotel. “Hey, pal!” he shouted back over his shoulder: “Am I steppin'? Am I steppin'?”

I let myself smile. I wondered if I was going to have to take my foot out to get the shoe free.

“Say, I heard a good one about the Vice President,” he shouted back.

“What—!?”

“Back in the war, see, when he was tryin' to dodge the draft, he went to work for the OPA. And while he was there, he picked up this chick and took her out by the old quarry and parked with her. He says, ‘I hope ya don't mind if we park here a little while—it's okay, cuz I
am
Dick Nixon of the OPA!' And she says, ‘Well, I don't usually do this sorta thing, but I guess it's all right, so long as you're Dick Nixon of the OPA…!'”

“Uh, listen…”

“So he puts his arm around her, see, and he says, ‘I hope ya don't mind my puttin' my arm around ya like this, it's really okay, on accounta I
am
Dick Nixon of the OPA!' And she says, ‘Well, I usually don't allow—'”

“Yeah, listen, I've heard that—”

“Wait a minute! It gets better! He puts his other hand on her knee, see, and—”

“
I said I've heard it!
” God, I hated this small talk. “
Don't you know who I am?
”

“All right, all right, don't get sore! Just tryin' to cheer ya up. Jesus…!” He was grimacing at me through the rear-view mirror, not watching the street. There were people wandering back and forth in our path and I was afraid he was going to kill somebody. Mrs. Fillmore, I remembered, died in the Willard Hotel. Uncle Sam was through with her by then, though.

Suddenly, the cabbie spotted a pair of copulating dogs in the street—“
Whoopee!
” he cried, took aim, and roared forward. I was thrown back, anchored by my stuck foot, into the hard rusty springs of the old ruptured rear seat. The cab had no shocks left at all. It was like a jeep ride I'd had through a shelling near Bougainville, only the jeep had been in better condition. The dogs saw us coming, wound about frantically trying to get separated, finally lurched in a six-footed panic across the wide avenue toward the distant curb, hopelessly hung up on each other. I noticed, as the cabdriver, yowling like a wild Indian, reeled cross-traffic after the dogs, that we were near the FBI building, and I hoped I wouldn't be recognized.

I cried out something, I don't remember what, didn't matter, I couldn't even hear myself over the cabbie's hallooing. I was hanging onto the door with one hand, the seat with the other, and I saw as I glanced up at the rear-view mirror that I was grinning madly. Oddly, the cabdriver was looking back at me, not out at the street. Buses and automobiles swung in and out of our path like the crazy cars in the old Keystone Kops movies, the dogs blundering through the screeching wheels, yelping with pain and dismay, scrambling miserably for a foothold. Some people ride in taxis all the time. They say they like it. They like to make contact with the man in the street, they say. They must be crazy.

We were closing in on the dogs. The one on top was half twisted away now, both front paws down on the pavement to one side of the bottom dog, but his left hind leg stuck straight up in the air. They seemed to be trying to go in two different directions, and each time the top dog kicked, the bottom dog's back legs splayed out. I watched aghast as we bore down on them. I no longer even knew which direction we were headed. I was afraid I might get carsick. We crossed paths with a trolleybus, sideswiped an open police car, and caught the dogs just as they reached the curb, clipping the top one in the butt and sending them both skidding, still locked up, spraddle-legged and yipping wildly, right into the doorway of the National Theater. Closed, I saw.
Guys and Dolls
coming June 29. Cast Intact. Interrupting Its Sensational New York Run. “
Goal!
” the cabbie cried.

The cab had spun sharply and stopped dead. I sat back in a cold sweat. I was too weak to open the door and get out. “
Hoo-eee!
” the driver crowed happily, leaning back over the seat and slapping me on the leg. “That's one piece o' ass them old houndawgs won't soon fergit!” I winced at the contact. I'm no shrinking violet, I'm a political animal, after all, I know what it is to be down in the arena—but I can't go out and grab people and hug them and carry on, and I don't like them grabbing me. Especially on the leg. It doesn't come natural to me to be a buddy-buddy boy, with cabdrivers least of all. He winked and squeezed my knee. Reflexively, I jerked my foot right out of its trapped shoe. “Yeah, I know who ya are, Nick,” he said.

“Nick…?” I squeaked. Nobody had called me that in eight or nine years. Not since the Navy, the South Pacific…

“Green Island, remember?” he grinned. He turned back to restart the motor. “I guess it's
Commander
Nick now, ain't it? Haw haw! Just read about your promotion!”

I stared numbly at him in the mirror, trying to place him. Some guy I'd cleaned out in a poker game out there? Was that it, had he been lying in wait for me all these years? I tried, feebly, to smile. “Do I, uh…?”

He pushed his way brusquely back through oncoming traffic to the right side of the road. “Ho ho, Nixon's by God Hamburger Stand, remember that? You sure had it made out there, Nick! Green fuckin' Island, no shit—you musta hated to see the war end!”

“What do you mean?” There was a tightness in my chest. I felt a little like that guy wrestling a horse in front of the Archives Building we'd just passed. “It wasn't…there wasn't—”

“Everything from cunts and whiskey to captured Jap rifles, cupcakes and influence, you spread an amazin' menu, Nick! A livin' legend! They say ya socked away a cool hunderd grand on that tour!”

“Ten
thousand, that's all,” I protested, but he seemed to laugh harder than ever at this. “Besides, that…that was from poker.”

“Sure
it was, Nick!
Sure
it was! Haw haw! And where'd all that famous chopped meat come from you was boondogglin'? Most of it was headed for those poor dumb cocksuckers out to sea and off in the battle zones, wasn't it, Nick? Booze for the enlisted goddamn men, am I right? Eh, Commander?”

“Well, if I hadn't…somebody else…”

“Haw haw! Right! I
believe
you, Nick! I'm
with
ya! The only fuckin' goddamn legitimate American hero in the
war
, Nick, I
mean
that! Hairy Dick, the Hamburger King a the South Pacific! The Big Bug a Green Island, the Sultan of SCAT—they shoulda give you a
medal
, Nick!”