The Fake President

PART 1

1

The presidential election of 2032 made history.

Rocio Bowling, the incumbent female president, fought hard, but she ended up as a one-term head of state. Her campaign lacked the inspiring power that had dethroned her predecessor, and the electorate doubted she, in a second term, would be able to handle the mountain of problems the country faced.

We Will Win had, in all its simplicity, been the slogan to defeat President Blight the previous President—that and her unbridled energy and fighting power. We Will Win Again would probably not cut it, the party thought, so after long deliberations, they made her run with Four More Years. When a TV anchor quipped, Four more years in hell, her opponents picked up on it, and banners and stickers appeared with Four More Years in Hell.

She fell into a trap during the final televised primary debate. She defended more than she attacked, her opponent took immediate and eloquent advantage, and several of his supporters in the crowd started a chant of No more years in hell! No more years in hell!

Her opponent for the party’s nomination, Harvey Hampton, had a youthful appearance at forty-seven, with an easy smile, a twinkle in his intelligent blue eyes, and a wild lock of hair that refused to stay in place. He had decency, which the people now valued more in a candidate than election promises, which they knew were seldom kept. It made Hampton an almost unbeatable candidate.

She took a sip of Chateau de Grace, swirled the ruby-colored wine in the goblet, and held it pensively against the light. So this was it. This was how her successful career ended.

Was she really sorry?

She had always been ambitious, climbing the ladder as if divine powers pushed her up, ultimately becoming the first female president in a gender-stacked card game with only kings and no queens. Her first term as vice president had been remarkable, guaranteeing the second term of the president and then her first. But the past four years as president and commander in chief had been exhausting, and maybe the electorate could see it in her eyes: she was tired. She still missed Douglas, her husband, who had passed away early in her term. She missed his support, his wise consult on difficult issues, and especially the warmth of his embrace. Had her ambition contributed to his untimely death? He had been a talented man, but his dreams always had been secondary to her ascending political appointments. The White House had been a nightmarish cage for the handsome, energetic, full-of-life adventurer she had fallen in love with. Protocol had clipped his wings, and his candle had slowly extinguished. Doug hadn’t been born to live the life of First Husband; he would have loved to become a father, but there always had been a reason for her to postpone, until it was too late. What had she done to that lovely man? Had it all been worth it?

She cherished this half hour alone with herself. Her gaze rested on a black-and-white picture of Doug, which the tears she was fighting started to blur. Soon a delegation of those who’d fought her lost battle would arrive to show sympathy—like condolences at a funeral.

She unnecessarily straightened her dress, a turquoise Oscar de la Renta that her advisers claimed made her look both feminine and presidential. She checked her reflection in the mirror: her hair was still okay. With her fingers, she secured a few gray strands in her still-shiny black hair, turning her head left and right. Then, moving closer to the mirror, she refreshed her dark red lipstick. At sixty-one, she was still in great shape, thanks to a stringent regimen of diet and exercise. Many a male world leader tried to visualize how she must have looked as a young woman, and in meetings, she often took advantage of it. But worrying wrinkles had started to appear on her forehead, and her cheeks were slightly thinner than they used to be.

How could she hide from her staff and supporters the inner feeling of contentment that it was finally over? The ambition and drive that had taken her to the Oval Office had subsided. How she envied couples who, in the autumn of their years, could just settle into some suburban cottage, enjoying the grandchildren playing in the backyard while Dad barbecued, Mom kept an eye on the children, Grandpa read his papers, and Grandma watered the flowers. Norman Rockwell at his best.

She remembered the thrill when Hail to the Chief had been played the first time for her and the first time she’d boarded Air Force One, looking around her when nobody noticed, thinking, Rocio Bowling! Girl, is it really you? She had been on her way to Pyongyang in North Korea to meet with President Kim Yo Jong to sign the postwar assistance program named after ex-President Obama, The short war between the United States and North Korea had been devastating for the small country. After North Korea had fired the first missile at America, which had been intercepted just in time, sabotage had incapacitated most of Kim Jong Un’s nuclear rocket-launching facilities, and America’s revenge had been immediate and brutal. The president and many of his yes-men had been executed. Kim Yo Jong had been open to negotiations toward rebuilding the country and starting the long process of possible reunification with South Korea.

Late one evening, Doug and Rocio had been in bed, where they often discussed certain things related to her responsibilities that concerned her, and Doug had suggested the Obama Plan: Something like the Marshall Plan for Europe after the Second World War. It had passed the House and the Senate, and a workable contact between Rocio and North Korea’s female president had been established. The first round table between the North and the South had been promising. A possible world war had been avoided when she pacified President Putin, who had his hands full with the opposition in Russia.

On the return flight, she had leaned back in the comfortable, soft leather chair in the private presidential section of the brand-new hydro Boeing 800 AZ. She’d looked out the window at the uniformed drivers standing at attention next to the armored electrical vehicles on the platform and had watched them slowly shrink when the plane took off.

Putting her glass down on the table under the mirror now, Rocio looked around the room. This small dressing room in the southwest corner had been the only place where she could be alone away from it all for a moment. It was the room where she’d cried her heart out after Doug’s fatal heart attack. Would she miss it?

She sat down in her favorite twice-upholstered chair, the one thing reminiscent of her student room, where she had been happy and her life still had been her own. The comfy chair had been the envy of her friends.

She thought about Roosevelt Elementary School in the small village north of Columbia, South Carolina. She had hated that school, where the girls had called her names because she was different. In class, she’d made sure to pay attention and not miss a word of the language that was so different from the Spanish her Mexican mother still spoke at home. Her father, bless his soul, never had mastered the language beyond ordering a cerveza, which he considered knowledge enough. At the proms, she charmingly had refused many advances. Handsome Doug, as proud as a peacock, had won the competition for the hand of the strikingly beautiful young woman.

Her self-assurance had risen. She had majored in political science and received a doctorate in law, while Doug had become a civil engineer and several times Sportsman of the Year. For their honeymoon, they had gone to Peru and hiked all the way up to Machu Picchu. They had made love as if they had invented it and considered it a perfect alternative to food and drink.

Then she had become aware of the struggle of hardworking immigrants striving to become an accepted part of society and their fair demand to receive adequate pay, access to health care, and education for their children to compensate for doing the work no one else wanted to do. She’d joined the political party that ultimately brought her to the White House. She had worked hard, relentlessly campaigning and fighting for what she believed in, always putting duty ahead of pleasure—and ultimately, it had cost her the love of her life. Yes, she was tired.

She had no experience with defeat, but her concession was a call she had to make. Straightening up and voice-activating the earphones imbedded in her pearl earrings, she hoarsely whispered, Call Harvey Hampton.

2

1915

On the morning of May 7, newspaper headlines screamed in bold letters, "Lusitania Sunk: More Than 1,100 Passengers Dead."

The papers were yanked out of paperboys’ hands. The Cunard passenger ship, on its way from New York to England with 1,266 passengers and 696 crew on board, had been torpedoed by a German U-boat eleven miles off the coast of Ireland.

That same day, on the last page of the Atoka Weekly, hidden among more important information, was a small insert: Born to Zebedeus and Margaretha Hampton—a son named Marcus.

Marcus made his presence loudly known, but what baby would not have cried if the emaciated mother was hardly able to feed it? The sound of the hungry baby resonated in the one-room homestead built half underground of rocks gleaned from the 320-acre field in Oklahoma that President Taft had been so kind as to allocate to young Zebedeus.

Zeb looked as if he could handle the concession: he was young, tall, and muscular, with the hard hands of a farmer but the sparkle of a lover in his soft blue eyes. Margaretha had fallen for him like a ripe apple from the forbidden tree. Chubby but well proportioned, with firm breasts, wide hips carrying the promise of a large family, and an easy smile on her full lips, Marg, at twenty-two, the oldest daughter of a reverend, was ready to face the future.

But for a second year, the crop had been a disaster. There had been little rain, and the Muddy Boggy River had been dry. It was the worst time to welcome their first child, but Marg had been excited to become a mother and assured Zeb that help would come from the Lord.

I hope God knows how to handle a plow, Zeb thought.

He walked the three miles to the home of his childless next-door neighbors, who had been farming their lot for many years and were in better shape. The generosity of the old religious couple kept the baby, Zeb, and Margaretha alive. God works in strange ways, Marg assured him, but just to be sure, he thanked his charitable neighbors first.

As if God thought they had been tested enough, the next year and several years after, there was rain when needed and bright sunshine when the crop was growing. Zeb smiled when he saw little Marcus trying to help his dad build their new homestead—above ground this time, with three rooms and a shed for a cow, two goats, and half a dozen young pigs. Marcus adopted the old neighbors as Grandpa and Grandma, and the couple delighted in the energetic young child, having never had one themselves.

Then Grandpa died, and from a broken heart, Grandma died only two weeks later.

There were few people at the simple funeral. Zebedeus dug the graves next to each other, said a prayer, and marked the graves with crosses he had carved himself, with the names of the couple.

Marcus was sad and forlorn, so Zeb got him a Labrador puppy.

Zeb was surprised and delighted when the sheriff visited him with a lawyer from the big city to inform him that the childless couple had left their land and everything on it to him and Marg. All he had to do was sign his name on some papers attached to a drawing.

He built a sturdy fence around the two graves behind the cottage that was now his. Marg and Marcus planted some flowery plants within the fencing. After yet another bumper-crop year, he put granite tombstones on the graves.

He accepted a sharecropper with two sons who were young but able to work a field. They lived in the first homestead Zeb had built. To work the much larger acreages he’d inherited, he hired two black helpers. One of them, called Moses, was maybe thirty years old and as strong as an ox. He handled the mule span Zeb acquired. The second one, some twenty years older than Moses, was a gentile, slightly stooped man called Benjamin. Benjamin had a perpetual smile on his wrinkled black face and was not only a good field hand but also an able carpenter. On Sundays, Zeb would drive Marg to the Presbyterian church in the brand-new surrey he’d bought. Marcus had selected the four-year-old gelding that calmly pulled the four-wheeler, and most of the time, the horse cantered or galloped around the fields with mane and tail flying and an excited Marcus on its back.

Year after year, they plowed, seeded, and harvested the rich prairie topsoil, knowing nothing about dryland farming methods on the plains, which averaged less than ten inches of rain per year.

Ignorant of the damage that deep plowing did to the virgin topsoil, they seeded and harvested the same crop every year.

Then, one year, the rains never came.

At harvest time, seared by a relentless sun, the cornstalks lay brown and shriveled on the droughty soil.

Zeb cleaned the fields, piled up the stalks with their empty cobs, and set fire to the pile.

He plowed the fields again for the next growing season and dug deep in his reserves to purchase the precious seeds.

But the seedlings, despite initially promising a crop after the first thin shower in spring, shriveled again. Not giving up without a fight, the stalks shrank the lower leaves first and then all of them. The sun seemed to move on purpose to its zenith, drawing the last drops of life out of the crop, viciously murdering everything that threatened to become a little bit green and taller than a foot.

It did not rain that year or the next or the next.

The fertile soil, tired of being worked too hard, missing the grip of prairie grass to hold it down, eroded in protest. It took to the sky, flying through the air in enormous clouds of dark dust, blocking the sun, turning day into night. It suffocated man and beast. It robbed farmers of their livelihoods and starved those who used to feed the masses. Sucking oxygen out of the air, it caked tears on the dried-out cheeks of the beaten couple.

The dust bowl of the 1930s took everything Zebedeus and Margaretha Hampton had built.

With their last money, they bought a 1928 Dodge truck. In desperation, they went to California, joining the exodus of the hopeless, leaving a dilapidated homestead and a dead horse behind. The sharecropper and the field hands had long gone.

Marcus decided to join the hobos jumping on a train in the hope of finding work somewhere far away from the scorching, dusty hell he left.

3

Marcus ran beside the smoke-billowing freight train, which was reducing speed while approaching the bridge.

The boxcar doors were open, and he ran as fast as he could, hoping he would not stumble on the gravel lining the tracks. He jumped onto the footboard with one leg, gripping the sliding door’s handle with his right hand, but he could not work himself up, hanging on with his left hand to the carpetbag holding all he possessed. Suddenly, a strong hand closed around his wrist and pulled him in just before the train picked up speed.

There were half a dozen fellow sufferers in the half-dark car. They seemed uninterested in the arrival of one more.

Welcome on board. The young man who had pulled him in smiled. He was about Marcus’s age and in better physical condition than the others.

Is this the first class? Marcus quipped.

Indeed, it is, sir. Put your luggage in the overhead, and make yourself comfortable. They both laughed.

Maurice Francis, the young man said, introducing himself.

I am Marcus Hampton, and thanks for helping.

They sat down with their backs against the wall across from the open doors. The dust was still flying but was not as bad that day. Marcus opened his bag and withdrew a brown quarter bottle of rye, which he offered. Here. Have a sip. Then he took one himself, corked the bottle, and put it back in the carpetbag. The other hobos watched him, but the two young men were both tall and muscular, so none of them seemed willing to risk a fight for a drink.

They did not need to ask each other where they came from, why they’d jumped onto the freight train, or where they were heading. The answers would have been the same, possibly with one exception: Zeb and Marg had given their only son half the money they had been able to save. It was a fortune during the Great Depression, which held the country in its grip.

The money was in gold: twenty-dollar Liberty coins and ten-dollar Indian Heads. His mom had sewn it into the seams of the warm jacket he kept in his bag. He kept his dad’s old Colt .38 on top.

Virtually all men escaping the dust bowl in the hope of finding work somewhere in the North were decent men who’d lost what they’d built. They were equally impoverished, but violence and crime were regular occurrences, and Marcus needed to be on his guard.

At least one of them always kept an eye out for railroad yardmen, who seemed to enjoy wielding their clubs and beating the defenseless.

By the time the train approached Topeka, Kansas, the two young men had told each other their stories, and there was a budding mutual sympathy. As it turned out, in both their cases, their parents had known a time of promising prosperity before the dust bowl disaster robbed them of everything. Life had been good, and it had built strong bones and muscle on young Marcus and Maurice. They decided to stay together, realizing that on the trains, two was better than one.

Topeka coming up! one of the men shouted. He probably had ridden trains before.

Let’s get off here, Marc. This is a crossroad; there must be railroad yardmen over there and maybe even a sheriff. We’ll walk along the tracks north to see if we can pick up a train there.

When the train reduced speed, they both jumped off, Maurice first and then Marc. Marc landed on all fours with the carpetbag in front of him, softening the touchdown.

When they followed the tracks west of Topeka, they found a column of sorrowful men, most of them in threadbare clothes and worn shoes, carrying their possessions in gunnysacks or hand-sewn canvas bags with their heads held down. Some men wore stained and torn black suits with sleeves torn at the shoulders or holes in the elbows and ragged collars. Hats and caps were greasy and pulled low over sunken eyes in dirty, dusty faces without hope.

That’s not the way to go, Marc said. How about we walk north, cross the Kansas River, and then try for a train farther north?

Fine with me. I am ready for a walk after that luxurious ride. Man, those guys were stinking like pigs, Maurice said, closing his fly after they both took a long whiz on the side of the dusty road.

Maurice carried a small rucksack. They sat down, and from it he pulled a brown paper bag that held four thick slices of dark bread. He offered one to Marc, who gratefully accepted. They were both famished. There were two swigs of rye each left in the bottle. When it was empty, Marc threw it over his shoulder. Maurice smoked a cigarette.

Strengthened by bread and booze, they jumped up and continued their travel.

When, twelve days later, the couple reached Butte, Montana, Marcus Hampton and Maurice Francis had established a special friendship that would last for the rest of their lives.

4

They found employment at the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in Butte, but the work was backbreaking and paid little. Not much was left at the end of the first month after they paid for room and board. The landlady was decent and probably fed the young men, who reminded her of her son who’d died in a mining accident, more than the pay justified. The rooms and beds were clean, and there was an outhouse and a water pump for them to use.

Marc’s room held a strong wooden case, and he kept his carpetbag and Maurice’s rucksack in it. He wore the key on a string around his neck, hidden under his shirt.

When the foreman, a brute of a man, beat a young Irish boy senseless for spilling his coffee, Marc stepped in and floored the coward with one mighty blow.

He did not wait for his pay; he and Maurice said goodbye to the friendly hostess and moved on. This time, they bought train tickets.

They decided to go to Whitefish, Montana. One of the Irish miners had told them there were jobs available in the logging industry north of the city. There was only one other person in coach, an elderly priest. It felt strange to wait till the train stopped at the station and then disembark instead of jumping off when it slowed down. On the platform, they high-fived each other.

Glued onto the wall of the station building, they found numerous handwritten offerings for room and board, and they selected three of them on a hunch.

The accommodations that numbers two and three offered were barns with bunks that slept a dozen or so each, so they went back to the first.

On the corner of Baker Street, across from the church in the center of town, was a small grocery store owned by an elderly couple. When their kids had been young, they had built two rooms behind the store, which they now rented out. The couple lived above the store. The young men ate whatever the couple cooked for themselves each day, and it turned out to be tasty home cooking.

The work in the lumberyard was more to their liking. It built muscle and paid well, considering the aftermath of the depression was still felt, and they enjoyed the free weekends in the charming town.

The old couple, Mr. and Mrs. McGowan, seemed to enjoy the company. They often invited them for tea and, on Saturday evenings, sometimes for something stronger. Marc and Maurice became fond of the friendly people.

One Saturday evening, when Mr. McGowan was visibly tired but insisted on their company to share a drink with him, he told them he would have loved for his son to take over the store.

I am tired; my arthritis is bothering me; and with the city expanding, it is getting busier and busier. Good for the store, but I find it increasingly hard to cope with. He leaned back in his chair, grabbed the stone jar that stood on the small table next to him, and filled his pipe with curly tobacco from the jar. Holding the pipe head in one hand, he lit a match, striking it across the leather sole of his boot. Cupping his hand as if a wind were blowing, he held the flame above the pipe head; sucked in; and, with quick puffs, started filling the room with the aromatic scent.

The sun went down, and Mrs. McGowan lit the petroleum lamps in the always dusky room and opened a window. Somewhere in the house, a clock was ticking. Outside, the screeching of the magpies in the tall spruce trees was silenced by the chiming of the church bell across the road. Eight o’clock.

The old lady shuffled back to her wicker chair. An obese gray cat jumped onto her lap and curled itself up, readying for a purring snooze.

Marc took a sip from the whiskey and then chewed a bit on what he had just heard. Mr. McGowan, did you ever think of selling? Marc asked, as if his question were merely hypothetical.

Taking his time, sucking his pipe and slowly nodding, the tired storeowner answered, Yes, we did, but you know who would buy a grocery store during a depression? I know the worst of it is over, but money is still scarce. Janet and I have been blessed; God looked after us. We have never refused a poor person credit, even when we knew they might never be able to pay. Most of them have done so by now. Montana people are honorable. But to keep up with demand, I would need to expand, and I just don’t have the energy for it anymore.

Marc put his glass down and looked for a moment at Maurice, who showed a question in his eyes. "Mr. and Mrs. McGowan, how would you like Maurice and me to buy your store? We would stay in the two rooms, and you can stay upstairs as