Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (3 page)

 
          
 
"I rest my case." Burnham grinned.

 
          
 
"You weren't cleared for Category 7 till
today."

 
          
 
"It was in the paper. Or Newsweek. Or
Omni. Anyway, suppose I said that to her.''

 
          
 
"She'd have to say it to someone else,
and we'd have to hear about it. But technically, if you did that, you could go
to jail."

 
          
 
"Great. Picture this: 'Hi, Hon, I'm
home.' 'Hi, Hon, how was your day?' 'Shut your mouth, Sweetie, if you don't
want me to spend Christmas in
Leavenworth
.' "

 
          
 
"This is absurd," Renfro said,
snapping his briefcase shut and starting to rise.

 
          
 
"Oh, no you don't!" Burnham lunged
across the desk and slapped Renfro's briefcase onto the floor. Renfro sat back,
shocked.

 
          
 
"Look here, Mister," Burnham said.
"You're laying a big load on me. You're telling me that I have to learn
how to blow up the world, which I don't want to know, that I have to learn to
shut off a whole part of my life from my wife, which I don't want to do, and
that if I make a single mistake I'm Benedict Arnold and you're gonna fry me
like Caryl Chessman. Fuck it. I don't need it. I'm not flattered at being let
in on The Big Secret. I don't like knowing secrets. They're obligations. So
take your Q Clearance and your step 9 and your Category 7 and your forty-eight
dollars every other week and go back to DOE and tell them to leave me
alone."

 
          
 
Blinking like a mechanical toy gone awry,
Renfro said, "I can't."

 
          
 
"Why not?"

 
          
 
"You can't turn down a time-in-grade
promotion."

 
          
 
"What if I do? Forty-eight dollars is not
exactly Xanadu."

 
          
 
"You can't. It's already been programmed
into the computers. It's stored on magnetic discs." Renfro paused,
pondering. "You could resign. Resign altogether. You could commit some
minor infraction."

 
          
 
"Like?"

 
          
 
Renfro shook his head.

 
          
 
"It's never been done. Something that
would get you demoted a grade. You could appeal to the President to have you
transferred to the White House payroll."

 
          
 
"It's full."

 
          
 
"Don't I know. You think I like having to
deal with you people? You people who think you're above it all just because you
work in the White House? Give me a career man any time, someone who knows the
rules and plays by them." Renfro bent down and retrieved his briefcase.
"I'm afraid, Mr. Burnham, that you have no choice but to . . . grow
up." He stood immediately, as if expecting Burnham to take violent
umbrage.

 
          
 
But Burnham merely smiled and said, "I've
known for years that becoming a grown-up is a consummation devoutly to be
avoided. You've said nothing to change my mind."

 
          
 
Renfro wheeled and marched across the office,
then stopped at the door, his hand on the knob, and said, "It's only fair
to tell you: You worry me."

 
          
 
"Hell, Renfro, I worry myself. But I
don't lose sleep over it."

 
          
 
"How did you ever get this job? You seem
. . . unlikely."

 
          
 
Burnham hesitated. He had no intention of
telling Renfro the truth: luck, timing, a chance remark overheard at an editorial
meeting about a rumor that the White House was looking for speech-writers at
precisely the time when Burnham's hopes and ambitions were congealing into
despair that he would never break free from the chains of weekly journalism.
The truth would only confirm Renfro's appraisal of him.

 
          
 
So he said, "Brilliance, Renfro. My star
shone so brightly that I was chosen for the White House firmament."

 
          
 
"Well ..." Renfro said, willing to
appear skeptical but not to overstep the line into blatant rudeness, "...
I do wish you hadn't gotten this promotion."

 
          
 
"So do I. But merit will out."

 
          
 
"I hope you learn to take it
seriously."

 
          
 
"Damn straight." Burnham winked at
Renfro. "Loose lips sink ships."

 
          
 
A FLAMETHROWER, that was the answer. Quick,
surgical, final. Carbonize the whole business.

 
          
 
But where could he put his hands on a
flamethrower? An Army/Navy store? Even here in D.C., where a pistol was as easy
to come by as an Almond Joy, he doubted that a bartender or a junkie or a swart
Levantine cab driver could produce a flamethrower for less than five figures.

 
          
 
Of course, he could command one from the
Pentagon—the utterance of the words "White House" had necromantic
powers over the entire federal bureaucracy—but eventually he would have to
explain why a typewriter jockey in the presidential stable had a need for an
instrument of incineration.

 
          
 
Maybe he could manufacture one himself. Fill a
fire extinguisher with napalm and—

 
          
 
Make one? Forget it. He couldn't tie a bow
tie. He required a hatchet to gain access to a childproof medicine bottle. As
animals are said to smell fear in people, so machines seemed to sense panicked
ineptitude in Burnham. Clogged toilets overflowed; television sets fell into
spasms of vertical rolling; light bulbs torqued themselves deep into their
sockets so that at Burnham's touch they snapped off at their necks and left him
to choose between laceration and electrocution.

 
          
 
Punt the flamethrower.

 
          
 
Something had to be done, though. Threats
hadn't worked, nor promises, pleas, blackmail, extortion.

 
          
 
As he stood at the door to this garage sale
that passed as a bedroom, a puff of breeze entered the far window and swept his
way, gathering and blending odors and finally slapping him in the face with a
fetid stench that would have felled the Goth. It was a potpourri aroma of
socks, sneakers, mold, wet wool, dirty cotton, damp rubber, sweat-soaked
leather, milk, cheese, catsup, potatoes, bread, chocolate, cardboard, cat and girl-smells
that Burnham refused to try to identify.

 
          
 
But it was not the smell that bothered him; he
was used to it, had been conditioned to accept as normal the fact that a
twelve-year-old chose to live in a toxic waste dump.

 
          
 
"Let her make her own space," his
wife, Sarah, would say. "Biorhythms go in troughs and crests, like the
sea. You can't tame the sea."

 
          
 
"Who wants to be a neat freak
anyway?" his son, Christopher, would say. "It sucks."

 
          
 
"ShooWAH," would say Derry, the bog
creature herself, casting his way a gesture reminiscent of a Haitian papaloi
floating a curse.

 
          
 
What bothered Burnham grinned at him from its
place of honor stapled to the door—an enormous black-and-white poster of Che
Guevara, complete with scruffy beard, jaunty beret and feline smirk.

 
          
 
What bothered him also stared at him from the
far wall of the foul room—the bulbous dome of Mao Tse-tung bobbing in the
Yellow River, a hoary and patently phony photograph.

 
          
 
And what bothered him sat in a crystal
wineglass alone on a shelf, cradled in a bed of wilted ivy leaves, like a relic
of the True Cross—a cigar butt sold to Derry as once having been chewed by the
very teeth, caressed by the very lips, licked by the very tongue of Fidel
Castro.

 
          
 
And what bothered him filled the room like
swarming gnats, pinned, pasted, nailed and hung on wall and ceiling— pictures
of Arthur Scargill and Karl Marx and Lenin, newspaper clippings about the Red
Brigades and the Shining Path and the Symbionese Liberation Army and Islamic
Jihad, a homemade doll representing Ho Chi Minh as an angel, a shell casing
from a Sandinista artillery round (authenticated by Cyrillic stenciling),
and—most conspicuous of all, for it seemed to shout "J'accuse!" at
Burnham—a blank square on the robin's-egg blue wall from which Burnham had one
day (finally drawing the goddamn line) ripped down an idolatrous portrait of
Joseph Stalin.

 
          
 
"He was a maniac!" Burnham had said,
as he tore Stalin into tiny pieces. "He massacred twenty million of his
own people."

 
          
 
"So?" Deny had said.

 
          
 
''So? What kind of argument is 'so'?"

 
          
 
"Propaganda." Smiling serenely in
her perceived triumph. Deny had retired to the den, there to take counsel from
the avatars of MTV.

 
          
 
Burnham tried every morning to avoid noticing
Derry
's room, but because it was the last room
before the turn at the top of the stairs, he dared not accept the challenge and
close his eyes as he passed the door, for fear of missing the first step and
plunging headlong down the steep, narrow staircase. So every one of Burnham's
days was launched with sour thoughts about his prodigal progeny.

 
          
 
My daughter the Maoist. Didn't she know that
even Maoists weren't Maoists any more?

 
          
 
Castro worship, for Christ's sake! What did a
twelve-year-old girl know about Fidel Castro? He knew about Fidel Castro. He
had been at college in 1960, when McGeorge Bundy had sucker-punched an entire
generation by parading Fidel around the campus as the savior of the
downtrodden. Burnham would never forget the speech ' '/Queremos libertad!
Queremos paz! Queremos pan!" He had hollered and cheered along with
everyone else. Why not? No threat there. Less than two years later, a lot of
those same college boys were having their heads shaved and learning how to fire
M-14's because Fidel's list of queremoses had grown to include nuclear-tipped
missiles.

 
          
 
Why didn't the child fall in love with a rock
star, one of those harmless hermaphrodites who look like fruit salad and write
profound statements about the human condition, on which they are recognized experts,
having lived for the better part of two decades?

 
          
 
Why wasn't her room papered with posters of
disaffected boys and material giris, all of them oozing with grim determination
to slake their animal appetites?

 
          
 
Burnham heard his Puritan forebears whispering
from the beyond, but he defied them. His generation had been denied the joys of
premarital sex, a deprivation for which he would never forgive America. He
would not so torture his children. Let her have her sex fantasies. Let her have
sex, even! At least it was natural. Unlike communism.

 
          
 
But no. Her love was not boys but bolshevism.

 
          
 
What had gone wrong? Why was she not following
the path cleared by the "me" generation? Sure, a social conscience
was a healthy thing: send money to Save the Children, join the march against
hunger, picket apartheid. But to advocate the violent overthrow of everything?

 
          
 
What had he done wrong? (This was the black
thought he sought desperately to escape.) The fault had to lie with him, or at
least with his job at the right hand of the Supreme Imperialist. How else could
he explain pubescent radicalism?

 
          
 
His wife called it commitment, and was proud
of it. "She just has a healthy superego," Sarah said. "She sees
right and wrong in everything."

 
          
 
Indeed, Burnham thought: She sees wrong in
everything right, and right in everything wrong.

 
          
 
He pulled the door to Derry's room closed,
took a pen from the inside pocket of his seersucker jacket and wrote on the
door in large black letters: "Danger—this room is hazardous to living
things."

 
          
 
Then he walked downstairs, feeling like an
utter ass.

 
          
 
As in many old, unmodernized, skinny
Georgetown
houses, the kitchen in the Burnhams' house
was small, dark, brick-paved and in the rear of the ground floor. It protruded,
like a wen, from the back of the house, which led Burnham to conclude that it
had once been a separate edifice, the slaves' quarters or the cookhouse or
something else historically colorful. Sarah's only conclusion about the kitchen
was that it was as cold as a penguin's buns in the winter, since the central
heating struggled in vain to reach from the rest of the house into the kitchen,
and hot as cheese fondue in the summer, since the room's jury-rigged wiring
couldn't cope with the load demanded by a window air-conditioner.

 
          
 
The entrance to the kitchen was topped by a
six-by-six beam that capped the doorway at exactly six feet. The beam was
decorated with red bicycle reflectors and tufts of hair from several mammals,
meticulously applied by Burnham in celebration of the last times he had
attempted to propel his six-foot-one-inch self erect through the doorway,
pulping a section of his skull and bloodstaining the lemon carpet. He would
have removed the beam and raised the doorway if he had owned the house, but as
a renter he had neither inclination nor permission to make structural
alterations.

 
          
 
He reached the bottom of the stairs and folded
his head down to pass beneath the beam and into the kitchen. He must have
unconsciously closed his eyes, or he would have seen the rope of black fur
under his Bass Weejun. He stepped on it, hanj, and the cat it was attached to,
the cat that had been sleeping mostly inside the little bathroom off the
kitchen; that cat screeched like a traffic accident and shot off the floor. Burnham's
head snapped back and slammed into the overhead beam; he crumpled to his knees,
grunting like a gorilla.

 
          
 
In the kitchen, nobody moved. Derry yelled,
"You stepped on Lehrer!" and then, as if content at having announced
the day's lead story, returned to the Post's funnies.

 
          
 
Christopher glanced up briefly from a National
Lampoon photographic essay on tongues and said, "Swift, Dad."

 
          
 
At the sink, Sarah stopped scrubbing scrambled
eggs from a pan long enough to ascertain that Burnham was only stunned, not
bleeding. "The bathroom floor's cool," she said.

 
          
 
"Huh?" Burnham shook his head and
lurched to his feet.

 
          
 
"That's why Lehrer sleeps there."

 
          
 
"Oh." Burnham poured himself a cup
of coffee from the Toshiba brewer and sat at the small round table between his
two children. He dropped a slice of bread into the Bauer toaster and reached
for the front section of the Post. "Anything happen?"

 
          
 
"The deficit jumped another ten billion
last quarter, thanks to—"

 
          
 
"Thanks to us, that's who."

 
          
 
"What d'you mean, us?"

 
          
 
"Look at this." Burnham held up his
coffee cup. "You hire the Japanese to make our coffee, the Germans to make
our toast, the French to squeeze our juice and the Hondurans" —Burnham
grabbed a banana from a bowl on the table, ripped off its skin and dipped the
banana in his coffee—"to feed us fruit."

 
          
 
"That's not what the deficit's all about
and you know it."

 
          
 
"Balance of payments, then," Burnham
said, pleased at having deflected, if only momentarily, an assault on his
employer and himself. "The point is, you're subsidizing every country in
the world except your own. What's wrong with General Electric? They make
coffee, too."