Joe Steele (53 page)

He waited for applause, and he got it. He went on to talk about the need to keep America prosperous and to boost trade around the world. And he finished, “Patriotism means equipped forces and a prepared citizenry. Moral stamina means more energy and more productivity, on the farm and in the factory. Love of liberty means the guarding of every resource that makes freedom possible. This is the work that awaits us all, to be done with bravery, with charity, and with prayer to Almighty God.”

He stumbled a little turning away from the lectern. He caught himself before he fell, though. He was shaking his head as he went to the limousine that would take him back to the White House. Getting old had to be a terrible business. You could feel your grip slipping day by day, but you couldn't do anything about it.

Charlie didn't go to any of the inaugural balls and banquets. He never had. Esther didn't enjoy them. More to the point, she didn't enjoy the people she would run into at them. Going to a ball by himself wasn't Charlie's idea of fun. It wasn't like election nights. His absence at the social gatherings might be noticed, but he wouldn't be missed.

After January 20, things went back to normal in a hurry. With so many under his belt, one more inauguration day was only a formality for Joe Steele. He kept the lid on at home and dueled with Trotsky by proxy around the world. Trotsky was no spring chicken, either—he was the President's age, give or take a few months.

“I'm waiting for him to drop dead,” Joe Steele said at a meeting of his aides. He had held more of those the past couple of years than he'd been in the habit of doing before. Chuckling, he went on, “That place will fall to pieces as soon as his hand comes off it.”

No one wondered out loud what might happen to this place as soon as
Joe Steele's hand came off it. Anyone who did wonder out loud about such things wouldn't stick around long enough to learn the answer.

Joe Steele called another one of those meetings on a bright almost-spring day in early March. The general in charge of U.S. forces near the Japanese demilitarized zone had complained that his troops didn't have enough ammunition in reserve if the North Japanese came over the border. Eisenhower seemed to think General Van Fleet was worrying over nothing.

Even though the President had summoned his henchmen, he had trouble acting interested in what they said. He kept frowning and raising his left hand to rub behind his ear. Finally, Charlie asked him, “Are you all right, sir?”

The frown deepened into a scowl. “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head,” Joe Steele said. He started to bring up his left hand again, but never finished the gesture. His eyes widened, then slid shut. He slumped forward, his chin hitting the table hard.

His aides all jumped up, shouting and cursing. “Get him to the couch next door!” Scriabin said urgently. “And for Christ's sake call Doc Pietruszka!”

Charlie helped carry the President out of the conference room. “Be careful,” Joe Steele muttered, half conscious at best. They laid him on the couch, as the Hammer had suggested. Mikoian loosened his tie. His breathing still sounded bad: slow and irregular and harsh. He looked bad, too. He was pale, almost gray. Charlie fumbled for his wrist to take his pulse. It felt weak and much too fast.

“What is it?” Kagan asked.

“I wasn't counting, but I don't think it's good,” Charlie answered.

“What do we do now?” Mikoian said.

“Wait for Pietruszka and hope he can help,” Scriabin snapped.

By Mikoian's expression, that wasn't what he'd meant. “We'd better let Betty know,” he said.

Joe Steele's wife waited with the aides, all of them shivering and numb, till Dr. Pietruszka got to the White House. It took less than fifteen minutes,
but seemed like forever. Joe Steele had gone grayer yet by then. The aides described what had happened. The doctor took the President's pulse and peeled back his eyelids to examine his pupils. “He's had another stroke, a bad one this time,” he said. That answered whatever questions Charlie might have had about the headache a couple of years before.

“Is there any hope?” Mikoian asked.

Before Dr. Pietruszka could reply, Joe Steele groaned. He inhaled one more time. Then he simply—stopped. No one who saw him could doubt he was dead. To Charlie's own horrified humiliation, he burst into tears.

Charlie's humiliation lasted no more than seconds. Then he noticed everyone in the room was sobbing with him. Betty Steele, of course, had every right to weep for her dead husband. But Dr. Pietruszka was crying, too. So were Stas Mikoian and Lazar Kagan, the one who'd boasted of being able to dance between drops of water and the other who seemed to have no feelings of any kind. And even Vince Scriabin's rock of a face was a rock wet with tears. He took off his glasses so he could dab at his eyes with a handkerchief.

“What will I do?” Betty Steele wailed.

“What will the country do?” Mikoian asked. No one had an answer. For a day longer than twenty years, no one had had to wonder about the United States without Joe Steele at the helm.

A minute or so after that, a look of utter astonishment spread over Lazar Kagan's broad face. He clapped a hand to his forehead. “My God!” he exclaimed, and then, as if that wasn't enough,
“Gottenyu!”
A moment later, he explained why he was shocked enough to fall back into his childhood Yiddish: “Now look! That damned cowboy Garner is President of the United States!”

They stared at one another. For a day longer than twenty years, John Nance Garner had been the country's spare tire. He'd lain in the trunk, in the dark, all that time. Now they had to bolt him into place and pray he hadn't gone flat.

“How horrible,” Scriabin muttered. If Charlie hadn't been only a few feet away from him, he wouldn't have heard the words. Even if it creaked, the Constitution might need to start working again.

“We'd better call him.” By the way Mikoian said it, he would have been happier going to the dentist for a root canal without novocaine. But no one told him he was wrong. He called the Capitol. Wherever the Vice President was, he wasn't presiding over the Senate. He called Garner's Washington apartment—he had to look up the number, which showed how often he needed it. He spoke briefly, then put down the handset with a disgusted look. “He's not there. It's cleaning day, and I got the maid.”

A flashbulb went off inside Charlie's head. “I know where he is!” he exclaimed. All the others in the room looked at him. Well, all but Joe Steele. Even dead, he seemed impossible to leave out of consideration. Charlie had to tear his gaze away from those set features before he could make himself walk out.

“Where are you going?” Kagan called after him.

“I'll be back soon,” he threw over his shoulder, which both was and wasn't an answer. Once he made it out of the room where Joe Steele had died, he moved faster. Even if he hadn't, it would have made little difference. He wasn't going far.

“Sullivan!” John Nance Garner said when he walked into the tavern near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “You're early today, son.” He'd already been there a while. A couple of empty glasses, a full one, and a half-full ashtray sat in front of him on the bar.

“Sir . . .” Charlie had to work to bring the words out, but he did: “Sir, you need to come back to the White House with me.”

“I need to do what?” In all the years they'd known each other, Garner had never heard anything like that from Charlie before. He started to laugh. Then he got a look at Charlie's face. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” he whispered. He gulped the fresh drink, then got to his feet. “Let's go. I'm . . . as ready as I'll ever be, I reckon.”

They walked to the White House side by side. Garner was, if anything, steadier on his pins than Charlie. He was used to bourbon; Charlie still felt the shock of Joe Steele's death. As they walked, he told the Vice
President—
no, the President now
: he still had to remind himself—what had happened. “So you're it, Mr. President,” he finished.

“I never dreamt the day would come,” John Nance Garner said, partly to himself, partly to Charlie. “He'd just go on forever. Only he didn't, did he?”

“No. I can't believe it, either.” Charlie's eyes still stung.

When they came up the walk, the guards at the entrance stiffened to attention. “Mr. President!” they chorused. Word was spreading, then.

In walked Garner.
In walked President Garner,
Charlie thought, trailing him. Yes, that would take some getting used to.

Kagan, Mikoian, and Scriabin waited just inside the doors. They also said “Mr. President!” as if with one voice.

Garner nodded to them. “Take me to Mrs. Steele, if you'd be so kind.”

“This way.” Kagan gestured. “She's with—him.”

Betty Steele sat on the couch where her husband had died. There was room for her and for his body; he hadn't been a big man. She started to stand when Garner came in. He waved her down again. “Ma'am, I am sorrier than I have words to tell you,” he said. “He was one of a kind, and that's the truth.”

She gestured toward the corpse. “I can't believe—I won't believe—that's all that's left of him. The rest has to be in a better place.” She started to cry again.

“I hope you're right,” Garner said. Charlie hoped so, too. Hoping and expecting were different beasts. The new President went on, “You don't need to move out right away or anything. I can sleep in one of the guest bedrooms for a while. Take some time to get myself up to speed on what all needs doing, but I reckon I'll manage.”

“We'll do all we can to help you, sir,” Mikoian said.

“Oh, I just bet you will.” Garner's eyes were gray and cold and hard. They might have been chipped from some ancient iceberg. He paused to light a cigarette. “First things first. We got to let folks know what's happened, and we got to arrange a funeral that says good-bye the right way.”

No one said no. He hadn't known he was President for half an hour yet, but he already saw it took a lot to make anyone say no to the man with the most powerful job in the world.

*   *   *

C
asper, Wyoming, had twenty or twenty-five thousand people in it. It sat, about a mile up, on the south bank of the North Platte River. To the south rose pine-covered mountains that reminded Mike too much of the ones where he'd learned the lumberjack's trade. When he said so at a coffee shop or diner, he often got knowing chuckles; quite a few middle-aged men there were wreckers who had few choices about where they lived.

To him, it was . . . a place. To Midori, it was a spark of light in an ocean of darkness. The wide-open spaces of the American West awed her till they scared her. She didn't like to go out of town. Just a few miles, and any sign that humans inhabited the planet disappeared. Japan had next to no places like that. Too many people, not enough land . . . That was what the fight between Japan and America sprang from, right there. Here in Wyoming, it was the other way around—too much land, with not enough people to fill it.

Mike worked with John Dennison some of the time. He wasn't a great carpenter, but he could do most of what he needed to do. All those years in the encampment and in the Army had skilled his hands into learning things in a hurry. He did a little woodcutting to bring in extra cash.

And he bought an old typewriter and banged out a few stories. He submitted them under a pen-name. The first one came back with a note scrawled on the form rejection.
Too hot for us,
it said.
You can write, but you've got to tone it down if you want to sell.

He swore. He
wanted
people to know what it was like to survive as an ex-wrecker in Joe Steele's America, dammit. But editors didn't want to wind up in encampments. After a while, he realized he could write stories that had nothing to do with barracks and thin stew and punishment brigades, but that his attitude toward those things would come through anyway.

So he wrote stories about Greenwich Village in the Thirties. He wrote stories about breakups where the abandoned party couldn't help what happened and was left feeling sideswiped by life's unfairness. He sold a couple of them, not to top markets and not for top money, but he sold. Little checks helped, too. So did the chance to drain bitterness from his spirit, even if he had to do it less directly than he cared to.

And then Joe Steele died. Mike and John found out about it when they knocked off for lunch and walked from John's shop to the diner down the street. (John was back in the place he'd used before he became WY232. The fellow who'd denounced him had been denounced in turn, and had died in an encampment. “Who says there's no such thing as justice?” John would ask—but only with the handful of people he trusted.)

Snow crunched under Mike's Army boots. Casper's climate was less rugged than the labor encampment's had been. Casper was both lower and farther south. But the first week of March here belonged to winter, not spring.

The waitress who brought their menus was about their age. John Dennison had known her since they were kids. She got her blond hair out of a bottle these days. She was brassy and usually unflappable. Today, mascara-filled tears drew streaks down her face.

“Good Lord, Lucy!” John exclaimed. “Tell me who did it to you, and the son of a gun is dead.” By the way he said it, he meant it.

But Lucy answered, “He
is
dead,” and started crying some more.

“Who's dead?” John and Mike asked together.

“You haven't heard?” She stared at them, her eyes wide and red. “The President is! Joe Steele!” She wept harder than ever.

Mike started to let out a war whoop of pure joy. He started to, but he didn't. The counterman was sniffling, too. So were almost all the customers. Mike knew one guy sitting at the counter was an old scalp. He kept dabbing at his eyes with a Kleenex, too.

Even John Dennison looked stunned. And he'd gone into the encampments for what he said about Joe Steele, the same way Mike had.

“What are we gonna do?” Lucy asked, possibly of God. “He's been running things so long! How'll we get along without him?” She blew her nose, then grabbed her order pad. “What d'you guys wanna eat?”

They told her. She went away. “I don't believe it,” John said, shaking his head in wonder. “After all these years, I just don't believe it.”

“Let's see if we get some freedom back now,” Mike said.

“You don't get freedom. You have to take it,” John Dennison replied. “I wonder if we know how any more.”

That was a better question than Mike wished it were. He was having trouble getting used to what freedom he had. For fifteen years, Jeebies and soldiers of higher rank had told him what to do and when to do it. Figuring out how to use time on his own was harder than he'd expected. For twenty years, Joe Steele had told the whole country what to do and when to do it. Maybe picking up where it had left off wouldn't be so easy.

When Mike asked to knock off early that afternoon, John let him. He ambled around Casper, listening to what people were saying.
Anybody'd figure I was a reporter or something,
he thought, laughing at himself.

But he didn't keep laughing long. Everybody he listened to—in a park and at a gas station, in a general store and at the public library—seemed shocked and saddened that Joe Steele had died. It wasn't just words. Words were easy to feign. Tears came harder, especially for men. Mike saw more red eyes and tear-streaked cheeks than he ever had before.

The two things he heard most often were
He was like a father to all of us
and
What will we do without him?
He wanted to scream at everybody who said either one of those. He wanted to, but he didn't. Joe Steele might be dead. Flags might fly at half staff. The labor encampments were still very much going concerns. Anybody who'd been through them once never wanted to see them twice.

When he went back to the house he and Midori were renting, he found she'd heard the news on the radio. “This is what Japan felt, first when General Tojo was killed, then when we learned the Emperor was dead,” she said. “We thought the world was coming to an end.”

Mike had never told her he'd been the first American soldier to recognize the dead Hirohito. He didn't tell her now, either. You tried not to hurt the people you loved. He did say, “General Tojo may not go down in history too well. Neither will Joe Steele.”

“Who is President now? They say Garner, but I do not know anything about Garner,” Midori said.

“We'll all find out,” Mike answered. “He's an old man. He's been Vice President since 1933. He's from Texas. He used to be in Congress. Now you know as much about him as I do. I don't even know if he can hold on to the job.”

“Will someone try to take it away from him?” Midori asked. “Can they do that here in America?”

“If you'd asked me before Joe Steele took over, I would've laughed myself silly and then told you no,” Mike said. “Now? Now, babe, all I can tell you is, I haven't got any idea. We'll all find out.”

*   *   *

J
oe Steele lay in state in the Rotunda of the Capitol. Flower arrangements made a U around the bronze casket. Photographers had snapped pictures of Washington dignitaries—the new President, the California cronies, J. Edgar Hoover, Attorney General Wyszynski, Chief Justice Bush, Secretary of War Marshall, and a few Senators and Congressmen—standing by the coffin. Charlie wasn't sorry not to be included in those photos. He would have bet all the politicos were suspiciously eyeing the men closest to them. And he would have bet that Joe Steele, dead or not, dominated every picture.

After the dignitaries withdrew, ordinary people started filing through the Rotunda to pay their last respects to the man who'd been President longer than any two of his predecessors. Nobody had to come. Nobody had to wait in the long, long line that stretched out of the great marble building and down the Mall, doubling back on itself several times. The Jeebies wouldn't haul you away if you stayed home. People came because they wanted to or because they needed to. They came by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands.