Dewey Archibald—eyes grainy, lower lids hanging like hammocks—had been awake for thirty-one hours, all of them spent inside Secret Service headquarters. The building’s placid exterior gave no hint to the world of the panicked anthill within. Exiting the elevator and reentering his office, he glanced down on H Street and was astounded by the Sunday pedestrians’ restful pace. The scene breathed the repose of an Impressionist painting of strollers along the Seine. Somehow he needed to keep that calm intact. He felt like a party host who alone knows that the guest of honor has just slit her wrists upstairs.
It was noon but there was no time to eat. He found his hound’s-tooth tie crumpled on a chair and reknotted it around his neck in the pursuit of normalcy. The Service prided itself on composure built on the rock of preparation. Agents trained for assassins who might use rifles or poison gas, RPGs or knives, who might strike while the protectee was in a car, giving a speech, skiing, on the water. They practiced scenarios on a city-street set worthy of Hollywood and had their own model of the front of Air Force One so as to train for runway attacks. But no one had prepared for the situation currently before them: neither an assassination nor a kidnapping, but a presidential disappearance in which the protectee himself was apparently an accomplice. His brain dull and bald head sweaty despite the air-conditioning, Archibald found moments of comfort in the theory that the scene around him was too unreal to be real.
His cellphone jingled gaily. It was his wife, again. He’d boomed to all and sundry that there could be absolutely no STDs—spousally transmitted disclosures—in this case. His wife had sounded suspicious when he’d called her the evening before and told her he’d need to stay over to catch up on work. The line sounded like an adulterer’s and he’d stepped into the part with a stammering delivery, feeling as if he’d been acting in a bad soap opera. Archibald jammed the phone in his pocket. He couldn’t stop to talk now. He’d make it up to her when he had time—after the hearings, the thousand-page report, the weighing-in by 60 Minutes, Lewis Black, and Weird Al Yankovic, then the news conference announcing his resignation, at which point he’d have all the time in the world.
The St. Louis field director phoned in, then Lexington’s, followed by a fourth conference call with the FBI, followed by the vice president’s call, during which the Deputy National Security Advisor showed up in person. Archibald felt he was in a waking nightmare set at a mad railroad station, with unannounced trains arriving left and right. When the phone lines fell quiet for fifteen seconds, he placed his own call, to Chuck Thorne. In place of “hello” he opened with, “You sweet-talking soft-soaping son of a bitch.”
“Nice to hear from you again,” said Thorne.
“You promised me this goddamned trip would be a gift.”
“I know I—”
“And you were right—like the Trojan horse was a gift.”
“Dewey, listen.”
“You also compared it to balm of Gilead.” His secretary brought him a fax, which he scanned while talking. “But I’m telling you, it’s feeling a whole lot more like napalm.”
“Look, I’m as—”
“Like hell you are. But you’re going to be when I testify at the hearings, and write my memoir, and blog and flog your sorry ass—”
Thorne let him run, like a marlin. Two minutes later he began reeling in. “So what’s the latest?”
“Still at large.”
“Nothing new?”
“Nothing that makes any sense.” Archibald stood where his head would catch the air-conditioning and stared across the room at the United States map on the wall. “Went to Target, got cash, bought a phone, rented a van, bought a sleeping bag, all in St. Louis. The next thing we know he’s at a Denny’s in Mt. Vernon, Illinois. Then Louisville. Then Morehead, Kentucky.” His voice rose with each geographical point on the line. “He told the First Lady he’d show up on time in Malibu. But he’s heading east.”
Thorne could be heard drumming his fingers. “It’s been a long time since he’s driven.”
Silently, both men considered whether Shaw might have his map upside down. In the current climate, anything seemed possible, and in a flash of prophecy Archibald beheld the future: the scandal causing the breakup of the Service, counterfeiting going to the Treasury Department, fraud to the hated FBI, while protection, like an orphan in a melodrama, became a ward of the distantly related and unsavory Department of Defense.
“Where’d he spend the night?”
“No motel charges,” said Archibald. “He must have paid cash. Or maybe slept in the van.” He sat at his desk.
“Can’t you find his location through the cellphone?”
“If he’d turn it on, we could. But it’s off. Maybe it died.”
“No calls?”
“Just the one to the First Lady. So far.”
Thorne exhaled noisily. “Well, we’re keeping a lid on it here. Believe me.”
“I already tried believing you.” Archibald’s secretary returned with more papers. He glanced at the top one. “Looks like he did some catalog shopping last night with his Visa.”
“Yeah?”
“An Xbox. Twenty-two video games. Batman. Brutal Legend. Vampire Queen: Brooklyn Edition. Grand Theft Auto.”
“No kidding.”
“A fifty-inch plasma TV.”
“Must be for Malibu.”
“A bunch of movies. Public Enemies. The Little Mermaid.” Archibald skimmed, then asked himself aloud, “The Boys of Playgirl?”
Both men pondered this in silence.
“For Bianca,” Thorne spoke up. “She’s a big movie buff.”
It didn’t sound like movie buff material to Archibald. He turned a page. “He also went to a site called BikersRUs.”
“Wow. Who knew?”
“You’re his damn chief of staff. You’re supposed to know everything.” Archibald read further. “Bought a pair of low-rise leather pants.”
“What?”
“Plus a zip-front leather halter.”
“Bianca’s got a birthday coming up. Maybe it’s a gift.”
“And a full-length leather skirt.”
Thorne considered. “What size?”
Archibald squinted at the sheet. “Small.” He looked up. “Couldn’t fit Bianca. Too tall. Or Cassandra. Somebody’s got his card.”
“And probably the van. Why else would he be driving east?”
“Gotta go.” Archibald hung up, suddenly energized. Then he realized that if Shaw no longer had his ATM or Visa card or phone, it would be infinitely harder to find him. His eye swept the vast expanse of the United States on the map. He’d need twenty-thousand agents beating the bushes. And as Thorne had underscored when he’d made his pitch for the trip, the Service was stretched thin with other commitments.
Why the hell, he thought on his way out the door, couldn’t Shaw be president of Luxembourg?
* * *
Sitting at the deserted bar in the Marriott in St. Louis in an afternoon-long holding pattern, Hugh worked on his third Painkiller and felt it was finally beginning to live up to its name. He stared dumbly into the dark rum, the potion glittering with shaved ice like an Arctic sea, and wished he could throw himself into it. As the glass was too small, he was reversing the procedure and pouring the contents into his body. Trevor was beside him, plastic straw in hand, still with enough muscle control to successfully stab at the lime wedge lying like a galleon at the bottom of his gin and tonic.
“Tonight I’m dusting off my resume,” he said to Hugh.
“Don’t think I’d put this trip on it.”
“It won’t matter. Everybody’s going to know.”
“Cora should pay for witness protection for us. Plastic surgery. New past. New name.”
“Sounds a lot like Shaw.”
Hugh lifted off the pineapple slice that had been impaled on his glass and sucked on it. “I could be a pineapple farmer in Maui. Total new life.” He wouldn’t mind trading in his doughy build while he was at it. “Maybe come out of it with an Olympic body,” he said. His eyes floated up to the TV, where a barrel-bodied Russian in a leotard was getting ready for the shot put. Trevor’s eyes followed.
“Would Donna really go for that look?”
“I was thinking more of a swimmer’s body. And Brad Pitt’s face.”
“Plastic surgery’s painful.”
Hugh sipped his drink. “Not after enough of these.”
They went mute when the bartender got close enough to hear and both peered fixedly at the TV, ravenous for escape from their predicament, undermined by news coverage of an activist group’s parody of the Olympics complete with archery targets adorned with the faces of CEOs, javelins flung at a straw effigy labeled “Mortgage Banker”…
“Maybe Maui’s not really far enough,” mused Hugh. The much-tattooed female javelin hurler with the pierced lip looked to him like she’d swim the Pacific to kill someone in the thirty-five percent bracket.
“You think we’re headed for a class war?”
“Could be,” said Hugh. “And rich Japanese-Americans who write for NationalReview could possibly have a problem.” He reached for the bowl of peanuts. “I’d get rid of your gold wire-rims. Go with aluminum. Maybe wood.”
The screen showed a guillotine smartly parting the soccer-ball head from a body marked “Do-Nothing Politician.” A group of apparently homeless spectators cheered.
“Guess guillotining’s a demonstration sport this year,” said Hugh. “Forget dusting off your resume. Time to dust off Tale of Two Cities.”
Trevor watched the activists joyfully kicking the long-mustached soccer ball about, to the hoots of the homeless. ”Maybe we were a little late with Operation Compassion.”
“Remember your idea to ship the poor to the moon? Let ‘em grow their own food? Maybe we should have moved with that.”
“The plan wasn’t entirely serious.”
“Meaning ‘still in its rudimentary stages.’ ”
“Lunar travel would have to come way down in price.”
“Unless we packed ‘em in like on the slave ships. Which is the model the airlines are already using.”
Trevor observed the ragged crowd. “Probably wouldn’t work. As the Bible says, the poor are always with us.”
“Written before the Apollo landing. It’s a new ball game.”
Lola joined them, fresh from church, where she’d been praying for the president. Fresh from a brothel, by contrast, Victor and his tagalong sound man, Kyle, entered and ordered, the group eventually moving to a table. In the absence of new developments, they rehashed Old Business.
“You’re the one who got Shaw going,” Hugh said, pointing his pineapple slice at Victor. “‘Throw away the script! Give it to me raw!’”
“Hey, c’mon. The scripts were driving him crazy. Too much fakery. That’s why he left. Just like he told Bianca.”
“He wasn’t faking washing dishes. Or drying cars with the underclass.”
“Getting sick after lunch at that taco truck sure as hell wasn’t fake.”
“Looked pretty real.”
“Smelled pretty real.”
It was a bad moment for the two plates of gluey nachos to be delivered. Conversation and consumption paused for a moment.
“If he doesn’t show up on Friday, how’s the radio address gonna happen on Saturday? He’s supposed to use it to tell the country about his trip.”
“Use a rerun. Nobody listens to those things.”
“Or have a guest host.”
“Countries don’t have guest hosts.”
“Sure they do. They’re called vice presidents.”
“Or splice together sentences from ones he already recorded.”
“He’d sound like a robot.”
“Which is exactly what he is.”
“So stop programming him!” Victor downed his Scotch. “We’re the problem. Just like he said. No wonder he ditched us.”
Hugh ruminated. “This is Truman country. Maybe it rubbed off. He wants to be his own man, like Harry. Plain speaking. Shooting from the hip.”
“Firing MacArthur’s ass.”
“Right out of Celebrity Apprentice.”
“Truman did his own whistle-stop tour,” Trevor said. “Talking to people from the back of the train. Off the cuff. Not reading speeches. Some people say that’s what pulled out the win.”
“So let’s get out of his way!” summed up Hugh. “He knows more than we do. We can all go home!”
Raised glasses clicked and chimed above the table as Jess strode into the room. Head swiveling, she found the group and scurried over. Her voice was urgent but quiet.
“They found the van. In West Virginia. Fifteen-year-old girl.”
“Was Shaw with her?” Hugh tried to calculate which answer would be worse.
“No. Left him on Route 50, heading toward Jefferson City. He called Bianca again. Wants money wired to Kansas City. He’s clearly heading west. Which is where Chuck wants us. So get ready to go.”
“Are you kidding?” said Victor. “We just got through deciding—”
“Chuck does the deciding. And he wants us back on the road, all the way to Malibu.”
“Why?”
“Cause it’s clear that’s where Shaw’s planning to go. If they find him and he rejoins us, great. If not, we take a lot of footage of landscapes and towns, grab some slice-of-life interviews, we’re in Malibu for his big arrival scene, we add some diary sessions later, and we’re ready for the convention.”
“And what if he doesn’t show up?”
“Then we keep on driving into the Pacific. Either way, we’re going, so get over it. Be in the lobby in twenty minutes.” She left.
“Ours is not to question why.”
“Apparently not.”
“Blacks and women got the vote. But political mercenaries?”
“Still waiting. In the rain.”
“Ours is just to spin and die.”
The group reluctantly rose.
“I just hope that poor baby finds a way to shave,” said Lola. “Cause those whiskers of his are gonna come in blond.”
“Our president’s whiskers call,” muttered Victor, last on his feet. “And we must go.”
* * *
Marching along the trail through the woods in the afternoon heat, pockets stuffed with plastic bags, the president followed the gangly form of Danforth, who carried a six-foot wooden curtain rod like a Masai’s spear. Shaw felt he might be in Africa and found it hard to believe the man before him had spent thirty years in advertising, climbing his way to a crag in the upper elevations of Ogilvy & Mather. Seven figures, eight cylinders, six bathrooms, three ulcers, two personal shoppers…He was bald, with a long professorial face, reading glasses bouncing on his chest beneath a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. Shaw envied his hat—tattered but wide-brimmed, chin-strapped, vented at the crown—and the water-bottle holder around his waist, a double, fashioned from leather by Danforth himself, tooled with floral designs. His belt-cinched cargo shorts looked two sizes too big and his tennis shoes, perhaps a high-schooler’s cast-offs, sported “Ortiz” in black penmanship on the sides. Flecks of his former life still adhered: his Zodiac dive watch, a cellphone holder on his belt, now housing toilet paper wrapped around a popsicle stick…
“There they are.”
The president followed Danforth’s pointing hand. Woven in among the woods were rows of bent-backed apple trees, half-hidden in the landscape, a ghost orchard from an earlier era. Small red fruit dotted the branches. The men approached and sampled.
“An early apple,” said Danforth. “Excellent juicer.” He took another bite, his beard bobbing. “Aromatic. Complex flavor. Perky, but not aggressive.”
Hard to leave advertising behind, thought Shaw. He finished his apple, then the two started reaching their arms through the barrier of unpruned branches, dropping the harvest into Danforth’s collection of two-handled plastic bags. Freight trains clanked and clattered nearby. When the bags were full, the men threaded the curtain rod through the handle openings, hoisted it up to their shoulders, and headed back toward the hoboes’ encampment.
“Never used to get this much exercise in a week,” Danforth volunteered. He spoke with the loud-voiced vigor of the reformed. Shaw, still athletic, found it hard to match his gait.
“No?”
“Sitting on the train back and forth to Scarsdale. Gardener handled the yard. Pool man. Housecleaner. Dog walker.” He patted his lean belly. “Now I’m a staff of one. Don’t know how much weight I’ve dropped exactly, but plenty. Got meat out of my diet. Ulcers quiet. Never felt better.”
“So basically, this little downturn’s been a good thing.” Behind Danforth’s back, the president grinned. I knew it, he said to himself.
“In all kinds of ways.”
“Tell me about it.” Shaw pulled out his recorder, hit Record, and held it in front of him.
“I’m out in the fresh air. Working with my hands. Time for nature. Artistic pursuits. Spiritual pursuits. It’s fabulous.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Year before last I was in a tent city in Denver. Cherry Hills Country Club, after it went belly-up. Pretty nice spot on the fourteenth fairway.”
The president’s eyes widened. He’d played Cherry Hills.
“Thousands of people. A lot of ‘em well-educated. I never had time to read before. All of a sudden I’m in three different book clubs.”
“Is that right?”
“Travel writing, how-to, and Latin American fiction.”
Shaw smiled at the red recording light and mentally urged the man on.
“We had classes in leather work. Hammock weaving. People sharing skills just for the love of it. Mushroom identification. Talk about a lifesaver! More useful than any class I ever took at Dartmouth. I really owe a lot to Shaw.”
The president’s face glowed. He held the recorder farther forward.
“And to his Treasury Secretary. Heckleford.”
Shaw smiled. “Jim’s a great—”
“And all the other idiots running the economy.”
The president drew in the recorder, almost pressed Stop, but feared missing more material he could use.
“You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” said Danforth. “And without those jokers I’d never have known how worthless it all was.”
Shaw waited for the soliloquy to change direction.
“There’ve been challenges. Believe me. And it hasn’t been great for everybody. Some people don’t do well with change. Like my wife.”
Shaw’s thumb hovered over the Stop button. Apprehensively, he asked, “How’s she getting along?”
“Not that great.” Danforth moved the rod to his other shoulder. “Poisoned the dogs. Then herself.”
The president’s thumb went down. He tucked the recorder in his pocket.
“Couldn’t imagine dropping out of her wine clubs. Or planting corn in the front yard, like the neighbors. Or the dogs living on some cheap brand of kibble.” They walked in silence a while. “She was sensitive. Like animals that need a certain temperature range.”
Over two million a year, guessed Shaw. A silent epidemic.
“For me, it was a relief to stop caring what the neighbors thought. Gave up the toupee the first day I hit the road.”
The president’s free hand went to his bristly upper lip. He needed to somehow reattach his false mustache. And find another pair of glasses. Until then, he’d let his beard grow and hoped it disguised him sufficiently. For all he knew, he’d run into someone he’d invited to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom during better times.
They approached the camp, set among willows and cottonwoods along a creek. Though no Denver, it boasted a solar shower, message board, outhouse, and a selection of books and periodicals left behind by its roving population, curated by a former librarian with a Fiore button pinned to her hat. The president had already found a scratched but serviceable pair of sunglasses in the camp’s free box, washed his shirt with a squirt of borrowed Dr. Bronner’s, and accepted an offer of biscuits, beans, and scrambled turkey eggs with Danforth. He’d felt uncomfortable repeatedly being on the receiving end of “To each according to his needs,” glad he was among strangers, his weekend fling with socialism a secret. Sweating as they tramped up a rise, feeling the pole digging into his collar bone, Shaw told himself he was working off his debt.
He and Danforth were hailed like hunters carrying a deer. Instead of dispensing handshakes, the president gave out apples from the nearest plastic bag to men in shorts emerging from tarp shelters, a smaller number of women, and the occasional family, sometimes complete with grandparents. It struck Shaw that no one he saw was overweight. Certain residents were underkempt, and some could have kept a dentist booked for a week, but as a whole they were tanned, agile, with good posture, exuding the health that the apple orchard’s planters had probably enjoyed, a rarity in the XXXL world outside the camp. The hunting-and-gathering life had its rewards.
They hauled their harvest to a wood and metal contraption Danforth had found among the rubble of the orchardists’ home site. He judged the apples through his reading glasses, sliced off questionable portions with a pocketknife, and tossed the apples into a metal hopper that fed them into the many-toothed blades that the president turned via a heavy crank. Minced apple flesh fell into a wooden drum. Shaw then exerted himself against another crank, lowering a metal plate onto the apples and sending an amber, sweet-smelling flood spurting out a chute and into a plastic pail. On the way, it was intercepted by tin cups, canteens, coffee thermoses, Fiji bottles, ziplock bags, and children’s mouths. Sweaty and still footsore, his blood sugar low, the president pressed the apples dry, then drank his own labor straight from the pail like a character out of Bruegel. He’d never tasted anything better poured by his steward at a state dinner. He nearly said so, but expressed himself with a long, satisfied sigh instead.
“First time?” Danforth asked, as if they were doing drugs.
The president nodded.
“Eat fresh, eat local, like they say. Cider has a way of making converts.”
Shaw felt like one. He’d signed the farm bill in March, everyone knowing but nobody saying that we were poisoning the country and ourselves. What was he doing leading that army of fools? Maybe he’d do what had never been done: dare to defy the lobbyists and party leaders and throw Con-Agra and General Mills and the rest of the moneychangers out of the temple. The thought passed through him like lightning, illuminating the same brain centers lit by his decision to leave his handlers behind.
He sat with Danforth in the shade of a pecan tree and took another long swig. “I sure could have used a drink of this yesterday.” He wiped his mouth. “Beat as a dog and dying of thirst, and everyone ignored me. And the town full of churches.” He passed the pail to Danforth.
“Christianity’s great. Too bad it’s never been tried.” He took a gulp. “Shaw said that.”
The president faced him with peaked brows and terrified eyes.
“George Bernard Shaw.”
“Right,” said the president.
They pressed another batch, saved the juice in gallon milk jugs, had a late lunch of apples, sweet corn, and plums, and rested. Then they returned to the orchard for more fruit, Danforth filling Shaw in on the E. coli scare, Israel’s elections, Pretty Boy Nussbaum, the missing Russian sub, and other news gleaned from his transistor radio and the latest leavings in the periodical collection. Drowsy from the heat and the drone of cicadas and his full stomach, the president let the news wash over him. Rome had survived with madmen on the throne; the United States would get along fine without him for a few days. Major Rinaldi and the football were somewhere safe. The vice president had his own football if required. He’d needed a vacation from the news, he realized, and found the hobo life increasingly alluring.
“So where are the old-time hoboes?” asked the president. They reached the orchard and started picking.
“They’re around,” said Danforth. “Don’t mix too much with the newcomers.”
“Like Shreveport Sam at the camp?”
“Perfect example. Geography-based nickname. Very old school.”
Shaw detected a whiff of condescension.
“Probably not even named Sam. Private. Not a word about his past. Most of us use our real names. Hell, we’ve got resumes out there, still hoping for a call. Plus you’ve got conflict over values. Some unhealthy lifestyle choices in the old-timers. Alcohol. Smoking. Snuff.” Danforth crawled through a tree’s ground-touching branches, gaining access to the apple-spangled room inside. “You run into a lot of after-hours talking and late sleeping. Then we wake them up with group stretching in the morning.”
Shaw reached high for an apple, pressing against a screen of branches, one of which sprang back, whipping his cheek and drawing blood. He gave a yelp. Danforth passed him his always handy bandana. The president had felt a boyish envy of his pocketknife earlier and now wished he had a bandana of his own.
“And their reading material isn’t always exactly uplifting,” the man continued. “Biology, mainly. The human female, specifically. Without a lot of text.”
“But they’re still riding trains?”
“Oh, sure. Around and around they go. They just don’t usually have a destination.”
“Well, I do. Kansas City. My wife’s—” Shaw halted, sheepish about being able to pick up any sum he desired. “My wife’s maybe going to meet me there. If she’s saved enough money from her waitress job.”
Danforth climbed out of his cage of branches. “Talk to Cavanaugh. Knows the schedules backwards and forwards. Former travel agent. You can pay his commission in cider.”
They returned to camp, cut the apples into slices, placed them on a six-story apparatus Danforth had built from oven racks, and dried them over a low fire.
“You ought to do something about that cut,” he told Shaw. He disappeared into his tent and returned with a tiny bottle of hydrogen peroxide, into which he dipped the tip of his bandana. “Used to oversee the Johnson and Johnson account,” he mumbled while pressing the bandana to Shaw’s cheek. It was dusk. The close contact worried the president more for his identity than out of fear of a Brokeback Mountain moment. Still, he was anxious for it to end. He thanked Danforth, got up, and left.
He wandered through the camp, and found Cavanaugh, short and spectacled, in a bathing suit and a traveler’s many-pocketed vest. He was ensconced in a sagging beach chair, a cane hanging on one of the aluminum arms, and was reading volume 37 of the Harvard Classics—Locke, Berkeley, Hume—by kerosene lamp. In front of him, barnboard planks lay across two fruit crates and served as a table. In front of this sat a stump, presumably for customers. Shaw sat on it and placed on the table a quart container of cider.
“I need a train to Kansas City,” he said.
“Excellent choice.” The man’s voice carried a soft southern accent. He closed his book, was suddenly open for business, glanced appreciatively at the cider, plucked a railway map from an accordion file at his right, and asked, “What class of service were you interested in?”