He Walked Among Us

By Paul Fleischman

The country has been swallowed by the Great Depression 2.0, complete with apple-sellers and Bruce Springsteen singing Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime on the radio. The Republican incumbent—battling his high–living wife, a populist opponent, and the accurate perception that he's rich and removed—has no choice but to follow

• Language: English
• Publisher: West 26th street Press
• Release date: Nov 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9780786753918

Paul Fleischman

Paul Fleischman's novels, poetry, picture books, and nonfiction are known for innovation and multiple viewpoints. He received the Newbery Medal for Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices and a Newbery Honor for Graven Images, and he was a National Book Award finalist for Breakout. His books bridging the page and stage include Bull Run, Seek, and Mind's Eye. For the body of his work, he's been the United States nominee for the international Hans Christian Andersen Award. He lives in California. www.paulfleischman.net.

Book preview

1

The tide is out, the ocean’s at peace.  A deep turquoise, as flat as glass.  Donna spoke in a lulling murmur.  You feel yourself shifting into a deeper relaxation.

Would more relaxation be a higher gear or a lower gear?  Hugh’s restless mind probed this point.  From the CD player came the whisper of a wave retreating.

Your feet burrow into the sand, like a child’s.

He’d never liked sand between his toes.  Fortunately, his pudgy body was stretched out on their bed, his wife sitting on his pajama-covered rump while her powerful palms steamrolled his back.

A breeze passes gently over the sand.  Instead of Donna’s usual New Jersey-flavored bark, her voice sounded like an oracle’s in a trance.  Then it riffles the leaves of the breadfruit trees.

Hugh’s brows furrowed.  Breadfruit trees?  She’s really getting into this.

We hear a call, out over the water.  We see birds.

Naturally, he thought.  Lifetime Audubon Society member.  Sierra Club.  Taller than he was, big-boned, a hiker’s long stride even when they’d walked down the aisle twenty-two years before.  Should have seen problems coming right then.

One of them dives.  A greater crested tern.

Whatever.  She was driving the fantasy.  Probably needed the bird on her life list.

They fly away.  We’re the only ones on the beach.  It’s quiet.

Quiet made Hugh nervous, having come from a highly flammable family, the youngest of five boys, each with his own cumulus of blond curls, all accustomed to shouting to be heard.  His and Donna’s teenaged daughters were both sleeping at friends’ houses, leaving their Foggy Bottom townhouse strangely still.  Donna moved up to his right shoulder.

The only sound comes from the little waves.

More plot, Hugh thought.

Just the waves.

The air-conditioning labored in the background.  She kneaded him without speaking, his five o’clock shadow scraping against the sheet.  Farther astern, Donna’s kimono robe tickled his bare back.  He looked over his shoulder at her.  Below her black bangs, her eyes were closed.  She’d come under her own spell.  Not him.  Then again, the White House’s director of communications was supposed to have a hundred eyes like Argus and was paid to keep them open.  Leaving his job at the office was as impossible as leaving his circulatory system behind.  He’d failed to convince their marriage counselor of this.  Her solution, self-authored, available for perusal in her office bathroom and for sale at her desk, was Getting to Know You: Journeys for Couples.  It lay face down on the bed, open to Chapter Three, Marriage in the Slow Lane.  He wasn’t sure how much more of the twenty-mile-an-hour life he could take.

He glanced at the clock.  11:08.  While Donna’s hands worked his lower back, he moved his head a millimeter at a time and brought the TV into focus over his right shoulder.  He’d muted it when she’d entered with the book in one hand and the accompanying CD in the other; with her back to it and her mind in the ether, she seemed to have forgotten it was there.  The screen showed a car ad.  He searched blindly for the remote with his hand, threw his wife an appreciative moan, rejoiced at bumping into hard plastic with his fingers, and changed channels.  A convenience store crime scene.  His eyes felt the suction from the camera’s sudden zoom onto bloodstains.  He checked CNN.  A commercial.  He tried CBS.  A bread line on P Street.  An unwelcome sight for a president of either party, but more so for Hugh’s Republican boss.  He turned on captioning.  An interview with a woman who’d stood in bread lines as a child in the thirties.  A complaint from the young mother behind her that the bread being given out was stale.  The male reporter opening a loaf and trying a bite.  [Chewing...]  Some difficulty swallowing.  Reporter: Maybe a little on the firm side.  Great, thought Hugh.  [Crowd jeering.]  Cut, he instructed the cameraman.  A man stepped into the scene.  Citizen: And what is it with all the pumpkin knickers?  Captioning wasn’t acquainted with pumpernickel?  Why’s the government sitting on tons of this [bleep]?  I’ll tell you why.  ‘Cause people hate it!  That’s why!  I got caraway seeds coming [bleep] [bleep] [bleep]!  The man grabbed the reporter’s loaf and threw it against the insignia of the Federal Emergency Rations Agency on the wall.  Reporter: Mixed reviews, I guess you’d say.  Back to you, Tim and Tanya.  Fear behind his fake smile.  Hugh could almost hear the news van peeling out.  Tim: People speaking their mind.  Democracy in action.  Tanya: Great to see, isn’t it?  Then a recipe on the screen for Pumpernickel Bread Pudding.  Tanya: Sounds pretty good.  Hugh flinched.  Only pretty good?  C’mon, he fumed, sell it!  Tim: Just like my mother never made.  Tanya: Try it, you’ll like it.  Tim: You try it.  [Chuckles.]  Tanya: Oh, come on.  Tim: Think I’ll pass."  Thanks for your support, asshole, thought Hugh.

The sun is about to set, cooed Donna.

He checked NBC.  Weather.

The sand underneath you has the warmth and feel of another body.

He could see where this was going.  Not the greatest timing.  It was mid-July of the presidential election year of 2014.  Speeches, ads, polls, the convention next month, fundraising, the ceaseless conveyor belt of bad news that he was somehow supposed to spin into gold.  Election Erection Dysfunction.  All his blood was tied up in his brain.

He zipped over to Fox, then ABC.  Donna released her satin robe’s tie.

Slowly, the sun kisses the horizon.

Hugh felt her breasts touch down on his back.  A wave broke, rushing toward him from all sides through the surround-sound speakers, bringing back his near-drowning in Lake Huron as a kid.  Probably not the association their marriage counselor had in mind.  He zigzagged between news channels to throw off the memory and braked at the sight of the president’s wife.  He was back with Tim and Tanya.

…First Lady Bianca Shaw, searching the streets not for food, but clothing, at Bellezza, one of Washington’s most exclusive purveyors of high fashion.  Our own Kristy Cole was there.

Not right after the bread line story, thought Hugh.

Donna rested her cheek against his curls, then delivered a delicate kiss to his bald spot.  The sky begins reddening.

Reporter: I sure was, Tanya.

Bianca was shown exiting onto the sidewalk, hemline high and neckline low, an auburn-haired James Bond femme fatale minus the foreign accent.  Jewelry flashed from her neck and wrists like beacons.

Cut the bling, for Chrissakes!  Don’t you know there’s a war on?  And please, Hugh begged, no interview.

Donna intoned, We feel ourselves catching fire from the sky.  The heat begins rising through our bodies.

She bore down on his neck in a twisting motion, as if wringing it out.  Hugh squinted, struggling to make out the captions.

Reporter: I guess I’ll ask what any woman would ask.  Did you find anything?

First Lady: One thing, yes.  A Carlo Fretti halter dress, silk, in topaz.  And a bracelet to go with it.

Reporter: Sounds like a success.

Please, prayed Hugh, don’t ask what it cost.

First Lady: I thought so.

Reporter: How were the prices?

Donna widened her legs, her knee lifting the pulled-back sheet, blocking Hugh’s view of the First Lady’s answer.  His head instinctively popped up.  His wife’s eyes snapped open.  She turned to see what he was looking at.

Hugh!

He unmuted the TV.

…admit I was a little surprised.  At first I thought maybe the prices were in lira.

Turn that off!

I can’t turn it off!  It’s my job to know this stuff!

How could you?  I’m really trying!  I’m making the effort!  But you?

He needed to hear the TV but sensed that shushing her might not be wise.  He muted the set and thanked god for the captions’ delay, sat up, and craned his neck around her, blind to the insult of choosing the news—and the local news, at that—over his wife’s naked torso.

First Lady: But we’ve had a good year.  I don’t think we’ll have to pull Cassandra out of private school to pay for it.

You bastard!  Tears streaming, Donna wrapped her robe around herself and fled the room.  Hugh sat up and raised the volume.

One last thing I’m sure everyone out there’s wondering.  Do your Secret Service agents go in the changing room with you?

No comment! shouted Hugh.

That would be a squeeze, since they’re rather large.  The First Lady gave a laugh.

Hugh’s eyes protruded.  Holy—

But they do come in handy.  Agent Boyce here has quite the touch with zippers.

Hugh stared at the African-American agent in the black suit beside her, the man struggling valiantly against smiling.

I don’t believe this!  A wave crashed on the CD.  Somebody shut this woman up!

Donna, steely-eyed, reappeared in the doorway.  You got it.

She held one of Hugh’s old bowling trophies by the gold figure’s extended arm, wound up like the softball pitcher she’d been in high school, and let fly.  The TV screen exploded.  There was a gunshotlike pop, then the scent of combustion.  She then picked up the fire extinguisher she’d brought, pulled the pin, and sent a hissing stream of powder at the machine she loathed, knocking over their trio of wedding photos on the dresser beside it as if at a shooting gallery.

She let up on the handle.  Breathing heavily, she regarded her work.  Glass glittered.  White frost covered the TV, their last tube model.  A hand clutching a bowling ball reaching surreally out of the realm within.  Forehead slicked with sweat, her robe untied again, Donna glared at the machine she’d unknowingly married along with Hugh.  She recalled the marriage counselor musing that bowling might be something that could bring them together.

She turned his way. Any other requests?

Fearfully, he shook his head no.  The thought winged through his mind that a flat screen would save room on the dresser, then that it would be tax-deductible.  She still held the extinguisher.  Hugh felt like a roach staring at a can of Raid.  His wife had once Maced a cat that had climbed the bird feeder.  A wave came in, then receded.

In the mood for a massage? she said.

Hugh forced himself to nod.

Good.  She set the extinguisher on the dresser.  Me, too.

She let her robe fall, climbed up on the bed, and lay face down.  Make it a good one.

2

She might as well have said ‘Let ‘em eat rayon’!

Kayla, the First Lady’s deputy chief of staff, backed up to avoid the spittle and poppy seeds flying out of Hugh’s mouth.

There’s God knows how many millions of people out of work and she tells the country they’ve had a good year?

Walking over from the East Wing, Kayla had known it would be bad.  She’d never cared for Hugh’s excitability or squishy body type.  She lowered her eyes contritely.  I know.

‘I know’ isn’t good enough!

I know.

Hugh’s eyes rolled in his head.  Bianca’s chief of staff was on vacation in Paris and the woman before him had no business filling in.  She was too young for the job, thin as a slat, with a similarly starved resume, another of the First Lady’s buddies from California who’d stepped out of the presidential moving van.  He was fifty, going gray over his ears, and felt like her father.  His eyes settled on the scaled tail of a tattoo emerging from under her sundress’s neckline.  Something was very wrong with this picture.

I’m sorry, she said.  She sat down.  Really sorry.

Great, but that’s not gonna help.  Have you seen the news?  He peered past the curving swoosh of red hair into her tiny features, afraid to hear the answer to his question.  The garment workers are up in arms cause she buys foreign.  The Police Officers Association is pissed for her slandering security providers and has just disendorsed us—a first.  Pretty soon the only endorsement we’ll have is the guys who club the seals for fur coats.  Hugh’s elbows were on his desk, his fingers raking his hair.  I’m telling you, Kayla, you gotta shorten her leash!

It was only ten but his shirt was already dank with sweat, the West Wing’s air-conditioning overmatched by the heat.  He grabbed a remote, fired at his floor fan, saw one of his two TV screens go black, swore, fished out a different remote from his basket, and turned the fan up two notches.

It’s not easy, Kayla said.  You know what she’s like.

You’re right, I do!  She’s like a bull who’s goring us in the middle of an election!  And if she does it again, she’s gonna send us all home to the pathetic places we came from.  Pasadena School of Cosmetology in Kayla’s case, if he remembered correctly.

OK, I hear you.

And she’s gotta hear you!  Talk to her!  Go over what reporters might ask.  What she’s gonna say.  What she’s not gonna say.  What she’s not gonna touch with a barge pole!

Hugh reached his arms over his head, cracked his knuckles, still buzzed with undischarged tension, and paced the passage between desk and door.  He stopped.

Like the dressing room question!  Jesus Christ!  ‘He’s great with zippers’?  And the man is Black!  Did we need to rile up the South and reach out to adulterers, all with one line?

She’s always been her own—

And that’s gotta stop, too!  She needs to get with the program!  He plopped back in his chair.  She could do us a favor and start shopping at Goodwill.  And lose the plucked eyebrows and long fingernails.  The country’s hurting!  People need Eleanor Roosevelt, not Cruella deVil.

Who’s that?

Never mind.  What’s she got scheduled today?

Kayla’s long nails clicked against her BlackBerry’s keys.

Pedicure.  Family photo shoot.  Then a magazine interview—

What magazine?

"Complexion Today."

Cancel it!  Wrong image.

But she was—

I know she used to be a model!  And we used to be in power if this keeps up!  We need more than the former-model vote.  Talk to Randy.  I want her in women’s shelters and soup kitchens.  Got it?

Kayla nodded and began thumb-typing.

Hard labor!  Hugh glanced up at one of his TVs showing a drought-withered cornfield.  Gleaning for food banks.  Dirt under her nails.

Kayla winced at the thought, typed bring gloves, then highlighted the words.

Job retraining, Hugh went on.  Hospitals.  But strictly pediatric wards!  No cheering up naked men!  And no off-the-cuff questions!  We’re nine points down in Gallup, ten in Rasmussen.  His eye was snagged by the crawl on one of his TVs.  And look at that—thirteen points down in Reuters!  We’ve got all we can handle and she’s stabbing us in the back.  And then there’s the daughter.

Kayla inhaled deeply at the mention.  I know.  She checked her watch.  I’ll get on it.  Need to run.

Hard labor! Hugh called out after her.  He closed his eyes, feeling his heart pounding and his bald spot expanding.  He stood by his window, cooling himself with the sight of the shade under a tree on the White House lawn.  It all should have been so easy.  The Democrats and Republicans had traded stints on the throne, but the economy had taken no notice and had always kept growing.  There’d been the blip in ’08, but it had passed in a year, a moment of indigestion.  With the past three presidents in their sixties, the Republicans had tapped Scott Shaw in 2010, a 38-year-old one-term governor from California, and had coasted in on a chorus of Happy Days Are Here Again.  And then they weren’t.  The economy had come down on the country like a circus tent, a second coming of the Great Depression that no one had seen coming, complete with hoboes and apple-sellers and middle-class families picking through landfills.  The reelection that should have been a given had become a gauntlet.  Not because of the Democrats, who’d long before borrowed the Republicans’ allegiance to Big Business and given up defending the downtrodden, but by third-party candidate Joe Fiore, the Detroit congressman and former autoworker who was leading the race, the first nonmillionaire to grace the ticket in decades.  With the two major parties seen as hopelessly insulated—the fois-gras-for-votes scandal that had enveloped the Democrats had been miserably timed—the country had embraced Fiore and his Your Party with a desperate, near-religious zeal.

Hugh watched two Secret Service agents cross the lawn, then realized that the tree he’d been staring at was a maple.  That spring, metal taps for draining sap had begun appearing in maples on a few hardscrabble streets north of the Capitol, then in Langston Golf Course, then in the suburbs.  People were hungry.  Gangs had moved in, turf battles had become deadly, mobile sap boiling operations were still being uncovered in Rock Creek Park.  What was the world coming to?  And why couldn’t the Shaw administration stop the slide?

The president entered Hugh’s view, sauntering toward the tree.  Hugh narrowed his eyes in study, trying to find the man’s one-time appeal to the country.  He was tall, seemingly a requirement for the job judging by the long string of six-footers before him.  Was it all really biology, not politics, the nation looking for a male of the species who could father many children and protect them?  Hugh watched Shaw lean a hand against the maple.  He was still blond, without recourse to dye.  Blondness was practically part of Shaw’s platform, a wordless declaration of youth, vigor, optimism.  What was left of the Beach Boys had performed at his inauguration, despite temperatures more conducive to hockey than surfing, followed by a blond female poet his staff had selected via Google Image Search.  Shaw’s hair was still full, parted on the left but with its disobedient lilt still in place, a child too endearing to discipline.  His Blondness, His Blandness, say what people would, letting Shaw’s hair crest his ears gave him a boyish appeal that had repeatedly raised his approval rating two to four points.  His locks were now at their maximum allowable length.

Chuck Thorne strode across the lawn, mouth to his phone, the long-jawed strategist who’d guided Shaw to the White House.  It hadn’t taken much.  Shaw was handsome, a quarterback at UCLA, his political campaigns funded by his family’s banking fortune.  He’d learned his lines well, first from his imperious stage-mother of a father during his run to the governorship, then from Thorne, a Reagan vet who’d been made White House chief of staff after the victory.  Pinocchio wanted to be a real boy and Shaw showed occasional hints of the same.  The Sacramento staff he’d fought to bring with him knew nothing of Washington.  Thorne had brought in Hugh when Shaw’s first communications director had flamed out.  There’d been a lot of that the first year.

A photographer approached, burdened with bags like a tourist, trailed by the First Lady, assorted aides, and Cassandra, First Daughter.  Hugh scanned his four-way split-screen TV, felt ready for a break from the snarling faces hurling words at him, and headed outside.

Morning, Thorne greeted him, gravel-voiced, from behind aviator glasses.  He was a head taller than Hugh, an ex-Marine with a silver crew cut, his spine still straight as a flag-staff.  Though they’d worked together off and on for twenty years, standing beside him Hugh always felt returned to the short wise-cracking editor of the school paper he’d been in high school, called over by a coach.

Another nice day, said Thorne.

Hugh snorted.  Nice?  It’s the thirty-eighth day in a row over ninety.  Maybe, just maybe, we oughta rethink our climate stand.

C’mon.  Toughen up.  Summer’s supposed to be hot.

Not like this.  Hugh wondered if all the hot air his staff had pumped into the atmosphere was partly to blame.  He mopped his round face with a handkerchief.  Another fifty years and it’ll be like the surface of Venus.

All people want to know is they can drive all they want.  So that’s what we tell ‘em.  Thorne, a true believer, was still in his coat.  Hugh had rolled up his sleeves.

And the customer’s always right?  Even if it’s five hundred degrees?

Our policy is one hundred percent customer satisfaction.

Hugh felt no bump in his spirits from the bucking-up shoulder pat he received.  I’m not sure how many more times I can say ‘inconclusive.’

Try ‘not incontrovertible.’

Hugh sighed.  I’ll do that.

Aides blotted sweat from the First Family’s faces.  The bustling photographer, long-limbed as his tripod, labored to herd his subjects into view.  Hugh swigged from the water bottle he’d brought, enjoying not feeling in charge.

If President and Mrs. Shaw would move a little closer together.

The president was in khakis and a sport shirt, his Everyman outfit.  His sleeves were rolled back, suggesting imminent action: fixing a leaky faucet, solving the Palestinian question…Bianca stood beside him, shorn of jewelry except earrings, stone-faced in a simple belted white dress.  Somebody clearly had talked to her, thought Hugh.  He marveled again at her lack of common sense, then at her husband’s performance on Meet the Press the week before, taking three tries to push his tongue up the hill of Herzegovina.  He reminded himself: no more working for political outsiders, especially young governors from western states.  Too much assembly required.

And now Cassandra, if you’d sit between them.

An aide had placed an ornate wrought-iron chair in front of the First Couple.  Cassandra sat down, a sulky, zaftig sixteen-year-old whose dyed black hair, black eye makeup, black fingernails, and black dress gave a stronger scent of the Addams family than the Adams family.

I was kind of getting used to the blue hair, whispered Hugh.  And the lip ring’s gone.  Things are looking up.

Infection, said Thorne.

There was a god, thought Hugh.  Now if only she’d lose the Goth look and twenty pounds before the mandatory family scene at the convention.

Peering through his viewfinder, the photographer noticed her left hand’s third finger discreetly extended.

Let’s try your hands folded in your lap, please, Cassandra.

She sighed heavily and complied.

Now for the smiles.

If you’d give me something to smile about, she muttered.

Try to be appropriate, snapped the First Lady.

Try not to be related to me by blood.

The photographer backed away from his camera.  Hugh closed his eyes.  Not much of a poster for the Family First Initiative they’d been touting.  He thought of the struggling family in South Dakota who’d won the Powerball the week before, nationally acclaimed until the drug use, mail theft, carjacking conviction, and videotaped incest came to light.  First Families were just as risky.  Somehow these people had entered the country’s living room.  Would they sit demurely or throw up on the coffee table?  It was a reality show he could barely bear to watch.

With your weight, said Bianca, I doubt people will guess we’re related, actually.

"That’s okay, cause with your brains, I doubt people