Gideon Payne was of course delighted to receive an invitation to the White House for a one-on-one with the president, but he was suspicious.
Bucky Trumble had told him over the phone that the president desired “to get the benefit of your wise counsel and maybe even a private prayer session over this Transitioning business.” Prayer session? My, my, my, as Gideon was wont to say, how the wicked do lie.
Gideon did not trust Mr. Buckminster Trumble, and he did not like President Riley Peacham. The occasion of his last visit to the Oval Office had been an attempt to get the president to intercede personally on behalf of Mrs. Delbianco, his latest Lazarus. “Lazarus” was Gideon’s private term for hopeless coma cases who were about to be unplugged from life support. They were a most lucrative segment of SPERM’s fund-raising. And made for the most poignant photo ops.
The meeting had gone…“uncomfortably” would be the best word. President Peacham squirmed and frowned and fidgeted throughout Gideon’s rather inspired monologue about the need to keep poor Mrs. Delbianco alive. Never mind that the woman was in her seventeenth comatose year and had been pronounced brain-dead and permanently vegetative by several dozen specialists; or that twenty-three judges had approved the family’s request to remove life support. Life is life, the most precious gift of the Almighty, even if it just, well, lies there growing fingernails.
What made the case worthy of presidential intercession-where Gideon was concerned-was the fact that a hospice worker reported seeing a recurring rash on Mrs. Delbianco’s stomach in the shape of the Virgin Mary. When a hospice worker informs a local newspaper that a rash in the shape of the Madonna is visible on the stomach of a woman about to be unplugged from life support, it is a certain thing that the hospice worker will snap a photo of it and sell it to the tabloids for almost as much as a picture of a newborn celebrity baby. And that other newspapers will reprint it and that national attention will follow. And with it, Gideon Payne.
Gideon did not succeed in getting President Peacham to intervene; the around-the-clock prayer vigil outside the hospice that he and his friend Monsignor Massimo Montefeltro organized kept Mrs. Del-bianco front and center up to the moment of her last exhalation.
Unfortunately, a few months later the hospice worker was arrested for credit card fraud and revealed that she had created the image of the Virgin on Mrs. Delbianco’s stomach herself with benzocaine ointment, to which poor Mrs. Delbianco was allergic. All rather embarrassing, to be sure, but-Gideon insisted-beside the point. Did not the Lord work in mysterious ways? Could He not have directed the hospice worker to paint the image? Who can know the workings of the Almighty? Gideon didn’t flinch. He valiantly defended the worker as a heroine who had done what she could to save a life. Some even suggested that he himself was behind the dermatological hoax. To which he tut-tutted, “My, my, my, how the wicked do lie.”
But this time, the White House had called him.
The president went briskly through the motions of pretending to be honored that Gideon should carve time out of his busy schedule to visit with the most powerful man on earth.
“What do you make of Jepperson’s Transitioning bill?” he asked.
“I view it, Mr. President, as an abomination. To quote Jefferson, as opposed to Jepperson, ‘When I consider that God is just, I tremble for my country.’”
The president cast a sidelong glance at Bucky by way of signaling his aide, Don’t let him start rambling on about Jefferson, for God’s sake.
“Yeah,” the president said. “That’s pretty much how we view it. Hell of a thing. And a hell of a different thing than that woman with the Virgin Mary tattooed on her stomach. We don’t think you had anything to do with that, by the way.”
“Thank you, sir,” Gideon said heavily. “That’s most generous of you. Of course, the real issue with respect to Mrs. Del -”
Bucky Trumble leapt in. “Mr. President, Gideon is the preeminent moral authority in this country in the matter of the sanctity of life. I don’t think anyone disputes that.”
“I sure as hell don’t dispute it. I know. That’s why we need him. That’s why we called him in.”
Gideon thought, Why all this slathering on of butter? What do they want, these two sinners? But opportunity trumps suspicion. Gideon had been in Washington long enough to know that when powerful people need something from you, it is accompanied by the sound of a very large dinner bell.
“You’ve seen the polls,” the president said. “The kids, the eighteen-to-thirty-year-olds, they’re going for it. In a big way.”
“Is it any surprise, Mr. President,” Gideon said, “that the young people of this country should be so easily led astray, when we have failed them so profoundly in moral leadership?”
The president frowned.
Gideon added, “I did not mean by that you personally, sir.”
“Uh, no. No.”
“I mean that we as a society have failed them. For what have we offered them but a false banquet of materialism? Video games, pornography, filth, copulation, fast food, downloads, uploads. ‘Thou hast prepared for me a feast, yet I hunger. My soul thirsteth for the Lord.’”
“Right,” the president said. “That’s why we need to come out swinging. Crush this cocksucker.”
Gideon stiffened. He was, after all, a reverend. People, even presidents, weren’t supposed to talk this way. He shot Bucky Trumble a perturbed look. Bucky shot back a look that said, Suck it up, pal. He’s the president of the United States.
“Grab him by the throat,” the president continued. “Kick him in the nuts, cut off his dick, put his head on a pike…”
Gideon cleared his throat. “Ah. I have spoken out against-”
“You know who’s behind all this, don’t you?” The president leaned forward, eyes blazing, setting the hook.
A look of solemnity came over Gideon’s face.
“Yes, sir, I do. The ever so inaptly named Miss Devine.”
President Peacham shook his head in disgust. “What she did to you on that TV show. It was inexcusable. Atrocious. Uncalled for. If she’d done that to me, I’d have reached over, grabbed her by the hair, and slammed her goddamn head on the table.”
Gideon shifted in his seat. It was awkward enough to have the matter of your having supposedly killed your own mother brought up in the Oval Office, by the president. Was he also suggesting that Gideon had been…cowardly on the TV show?
“I do appreciate that sentiment, sir,” he murmured.
“Ugly business. Fucking ugly.”
Gideon was speechless.
The president said, “Hell, Gideon, I’m a sinner and a salty man. I apologize. But this is how I talk. Among-friends.”
“I thank you, sir, for your friendship.”
Bucky Trumble leaned forward and said, “The president and I were hoping that you, Gideon, will take the lead against Jepperson.”
“Well, as I say, I am speaking out. I have hardly been idle. But, sir, why not take the lead yourself?”
“Gideon, listen to me,” the president said, lowering his voice and boring in like a drill. “I am up to my ass in alligators. I got a collapsing economy. Foreign banks are using the U.S. dollar to wipe their asses. I’m fighting four wars-and looks like another on the way, in goddamn Nepal. Someone tell me what in hell we’re doing in Nepal. I got melting ice caps on both poles. Florida just lost another two feet of waterfront. Hundred square miles of Mississippi just went under. They just found another tunnel under the Mexican border, this one a four-lane highway, for Christ’s sweet sake. I got a drought in the West the Interior Department says is going to make Colorado and Wyoming into another dust bowl. Pakistan and India are going at each other like a couple of wet cats, and don’t get me started on that hairball maniac in North Korea. CIA’s telling me Israel ’s preparing to launch nuclear weapons at fucking Mecca. Mecca! Gideon, I don’t have time to take on a one-legged senator who says the solution to Social Security is for us to kill ourselves at age seventy. Shit, the way I’m feeling now, I may shoot myself. And I may not wait until I’m seventy.”
It was flattering to have the most powerful man in the world supplicate in this fashion. But there was something just a tad smelly about it all. He was leaving something out.
“Mr. President,” Gideon said, “with all due respect, why-really-do you want me to take the lead on this?”
The president leaned back in his chair. He nodded as if in acknowledgment of defeat. Then he smiled, looked over at Bucky Trumble, and said to Bucky, “I told you he was smart. Didn’t I tell you?”
“You did, boss. You did.”
The president, calmer now, said to Gideon, “Look here. If I take the lead on this, all it’s going to accomplish is to empower the cocksucker. Don’t you see? His numbers’ll jump. He’s going at the president! It’ll make it a political issue instead of moral issue. Which is what it is. That’s why you’re the only one who can do it. And I’ll back you with everything short of air strikes.”
“What exactly do you propose, Mr. President?”
“Buck,” the president grunted.
“There’s certain information about Jepperson and this woman Devine that you might find useful in this debate.”
Gideon’s eyebrows arched like stretching cats. He stroked his beard with moist, scented fingertips. His lips pursed. Oh my, oh my. Yet a voice whispered, Careful, son. You’re in the lion’s den, and the beasts do raven.
“What kind of information?” he said cautiously.
“The kind,” the president said, leaning forward, suddenly every bit the commander in chief, aiming soul-seeking missiles into Gideon’s eyes, “that causes tides to turn. Let me pay you a compliment: We didn’t call you in here just to fuck around.”
Good Lord, Gideon thought. What had this man eaten for breakfast? Flapjacks with nitroglycerin syrup? Another thought came to mind: Were they recording this? You never knew with the White House. But then why record yourself in the act of offering dirt to a man of impeccable moral rectitude? Impeccable, that is, apart from the business about killing Mother.
“I would like to consider it,” Gideon said nervously. “I would like to pray on it.”
The president’s look of cold command suddenly congealed into panicked horror at the prospect that Gideon was about to invite him to get on his knees in the Oval Office and pray with him. He’d done that the last time with the “Stomach Madonna” woman, as the tabloid press had unfortunately dubbed Mrs. Delbianco.
Sensing the president’s discomfiture, Gideon added quickly, “In the privacy of my own heart.”
The president sighed with relief. “Of course. If there’s anything we can do for you in the meantime…”
Bucky shot the president a cautionary look-too late.
“There is something, actually,” Gideon said.
“Oh?” the president said, as if delighted to hear it.
“The memorial to the forty-three million.”
“Oh. Right.” Shit.
For years, Gideon had been petitioning various congressmen and senators for a memorial on the Washington Mall to the 43 million unborn souls since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973.
“Well”-the president stood, smiling broadly and extending his hand-“we will certainly give that our prayerful thought.”