Emulating the Minutemen they idolized, but fortunately in much more organized and less panicky fashion and far more slowly than the Minutemen retreating from Lexington on that glorious occasion, the Musketeers marched away out of view of the television cameras and their puzzled fellow citizens.
Malcolm put his umpteenth beer aside and stood up and saluted the television screen.
When the muskets had roared and the smoke had billowed across the lawn, the three simian brothers had scuttled for cover. Jibber had led the pack. He had been feeling jumpy all day. That morning, Tess had waggled her star-spangled behind at him again. She was determined to do her androidal duty as it had been programmed into her. Jibber had been keeping watch for her out of the corner of his eye ever since then. Any sudden movement, especially if it involved a star, alarmed him.
Now, as the sound died away and the smoke broke and dissipated in the light breeze, the three brothers appeared again. They looked around cautiously at first. When it became clear that there was no danger, they grew bolder.
Evading the Secret Service men by scampering between their legs, the three began to circulate in the crowd, charming one and all. Jibber gibbered adorably, Jebber made eyes at the pretty women and happily let them pet him, and Jabber picked pockets quickly and efficiently.
The Secret Service men were closing in — warily, for the little boys had big simian teeth and had used them on members of the SS before. Resignedly, Jebber and Jabber let themselves be corralled. But Jibber’s attention had returned to the un-Constitutional enormity of the national Christmas tree. Waddling rapidly away from his would-be captors, whom the crowd delightedly and deliberately interfered with, Jibber made his way to the base of the dying redwood and stood leaning against its trunk, staring up at the branches draped with lights stretching away up into the twilight sky.
A Secret Service man broke from the crowd. His clothes were torn, his hair was rumpled, his face was scratched. “I’ve got you now, you little shit!” he shrieked, instantly destroying his career, and flung himself through the air at Jibber.
Jibber squeaked and leaped at the tree.
There were no branches this low down, but the bark, rough even in its natural state and severely gouged by the equipment that had been used to extract it from among its dwindling band of brothers and then transport it across the continent, provided adequate handholds for the little creature’s small, strong fingers. Up he scrambled, looking more like a large spider or perhaps a robot than the son of the actual, for sure, goddamitall President of the United States.
He stopped halfway up, panting from a combination of exertion — he hadn’t done this kind of climbing for a long time, after all — lingering fear of Secret Service men and muskets, and exhilaration. Mostly from exhilaration.
As he recovered his breath, he began to smell insects. These were different from any insects he had smelled before. They were aliens, natives of a very different place, doomed creatures snatched from one of the world’s most beautiful places and brought to one of its most treacherous. Being insects, they didn’t see things in those terms. Being Jibber, Jibber didn’t either.
He poked a finger cautiously into one of the bark’s deep cracks, speared something interesting with his fingernail, and pulled it out to examine it.
He looked at the thing, wriggling helplessly against the monkey spike sticking through its body. He sniffed it and the juices oozing from its grotesque wound and spreading over his fingernail.
He put his finger in his mouth, sucked the little critter off, and tumbled it around with his tongue. He maneuvered it over to the right side of his jaw and then squeezed it slowly between his molars.
The crackling and popping feeling and the brief desperate scrabbling of its tiny feet against his tongue were a new delight. This insect was deliciously different from any insects he remembered from Africa or had eaten in Texas or Washington! This tree was certainly a fine thing, but the insect was even better. Wherever the tree had come from — and of course understanding geography was far beyond Jibber’s mental capacity — he wanted to go there. How he would feast!
He became aware again of the crowd below him. He looked out over them. They were staring up at him in amazement. Instinct told him to forget about the insects for now and concentrate on going up, to the heights where lions and leopards and humans wouldn’t be able to follow him. He gibbered at the upturned faces for a few seconds and then turned his own gaze upward again and resumed climbing.
Watching from across the lawn, Daddy was torn between feelings of paternal delight and vicarious pleasure at the exploits of his little boy, and fury at the little bastard.
Thank God we were able to keep him from being sent to Viet Nam, he thought. What would have happened once he’d seen those damned jungles over there? We’d probably never have seen him again. Or maybe he’d have shown up some day in black pajamas. You never know with these boys.
Meanwhile, Jibber, climbing ever more rapidly as he fell back into the swing of his original lifestyle, had reached the very tippity top of the tree!
Except that it wasn’t the real, original top, for that had been sliced off and the trunk had then been shaped and prepped and a large star inserted into it. This decoration would become the star of the evening when Daddy threw a switch. It would become a light unto the nations. It would be as if God had reached down one mighty, lengthy finger from Heaven to demonstrate to the world that America was his favorite nation, the divinely chosen Number One.
Daddy wanted to delay the lighting ceremony until Jibber could be brought safely down. However, various political aides muttered worriedly to him about the evening television news schedules and the suddenly bored and increasingly restive crowd.
Damn bullies, Daddy thought. People been bullying me all my life. Never get to do just what I want to do.
He pulled the switch.
Nothing happened.
Unfortunately, while climbing, Jibber had once or twice pulled himself up by the electrical wire that circled the mighty tree trunk and was meant to carry electrical current to the star. With the last such yank, as he was pulling himself onto the tree’s flattened top, he had managed to pull the wire loose from the star.
“Now what?” Daddy asked the Universe.
Quick checks were made and it was determined that there was no problem with the power supply or the electric wire leading to the tree. Clearly, the problem must be somewhere above the ground, somewhere up there.
“Up there,” Daddy said, pointing. “Someone’s going to have to go up there and find the problem and fix it.” Looking up, he could see the fake star silhouetted against the real ones. And then he saw something else that made his heart skip a beat. Another silhouette suddenly appeared next to the star, the unmistakable shape of his darling little boy, the hellspawn idiot.
“Good God,” Daddy said. He pointed again. “Damned good thing there isn’t any current. Someone’s got to go up there and get him down.”
He looked around at the sturdy yeomen of the Secret Service, all of whom looked at the ground or gazed into the general distance.
“Hmph,” Daddy said dismissively. “Need a helicopter. Do it myself. Used to be a flyboy in the old days, you know.”
Shamed by the courage or at least bravado of the creaking antique, a couple of SS boys reluctantly offered to do the flying and rescuing themselves. Fortunately, helicopters are abundant in and around the White House, for the nation never knows when it will be necessary to whisk the president to some trouble spot to perform a deed of diplomatic derring-do, or when it will be necessary to snatch him away from danger. Within minutes, the two Secret Service men were lifting off — wop, wop, wop — and heading toward the top of the tree.
They circled around the top. They turned the craft’s spotlight on and focused it on the small flat space where Jibber stood gripping the star in sudden terror. He stared openmouthed at the monstrous insect that was about to pounce on him.
The two men in the
helicopter wondered what their next step should be.
“I say we just shoot the little fucker off there,” one of them said. “Easy target.” He held up his hands as though he were aiming a rifle. “Pow, pow, pow! Blast him to smithereens.”
“Tempting,” the other man agreed. “But incriminating. We’d be the obvious suspects. Maybe I could swing in low and blow him off with the downdraft. Look like an accident. We were doing our best. Following procedure. Couldn’t be helped. You know the drill.”
“Good idea! Let’s give it a try.”
The moved down toward the frozen first son. The manmade wind blasted at Jibber, pushing him away from the star, toward the edge. But his fingers squeezed even more tightly.
Suddenly, part of him did unfreeze. Two parts, actually. Fore and aft. Terror emptied his bowels and his bladder simultaneously. Such was the force of his evacuation that his trousers burst apart and liquids and solids covered his legs and the ground in an instant.
They also covered the base of the star, at precisely the point where the wire had been pulled away. The fluids completed the broken circuit. The national star burst into life.
Jibber howled and flung himself backward, flying off the small platform and landing on one of the higher branches, to which he clung with arms and legs and hands and feet and teeth.
At the base of the star, the fluids and solids Jibber had left behind sizzled and sparked and danced in the powerful current, shooting off the tree like the dastardly rockets of the dastardly British in 1814.
The humans watching below were entranced.
“Ooh!”
They pointed at the brilliant sparks.
“Aah!”
One of these little Jibber-produced Congreves flew into the helicopter and hit the pilot in the eyes.
“Shit!” the Secret Service man shrieked accurately. He clawed at his face and the helicopter spun around and went up and down and flipped over and plummeted to the ground, fortunately avoiding the crowd.
The two Secret Service men were later buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full honors.
Jibber eventually made his way down the tree under his own power.
The full story of the incident was detailed to the nation by various television news services later that evening and repeatedly for the next few days.
The story they told was not entirely accurate in every detail, however. According to the media, the national Christmas tree had been sabotaged by Iraqi agents. These infiltrators shot down the helicopter dispatched to stop them and undo their evil. The day was saved by Jibber Longlegs, who single-handedly undid the sabotage, enabling the star to shine properly, after which he subdued the Iraqis and ate them, which was why there were no bodies to display.
“Plus,” the newsreaders all added, “on top of all of that, he sure is a cute little monkey.”
Watching one of those broadcasts, Malcolm found himself wishing that he were a cute little monkey. Or at least that someone would find him cute in any sense. He could hear Grandpa Tibbs sneering and snarling that he was worthless and would never amount to anything.
Thank God Marlene had never met Grandpa Tibbs. Malcolm shuddered at the thought of two such evil forces cooperating, creating between them something so terrible, so destructive to what there was of Malcolm’s ego, that the fabric of reality might have been rent by it. He could not imagine a greater evil than those two acting together. Nothing so terrible had ever been seen in the world or ever would be.
* * * * *
In the meantime, two old guys were wandering around Portland, Maine religiously offing men named Malcolm.
P. P. Something beginning with P.
* * * * *
The Longlegs presidency drifted along.
A reporter got wind of the existence of Daddy’s mistress and tried to dig up all the juicy details. The reporter was abducted by aliens. The mistress was sold to Longlegs family business partners in the Middle East.
The three brothers never stopped looking like miniature apes, but as the years passed they became increasingly human in the ways that counted.
Jabber never lost the gift of the gab. He went into business, specializing in crooked deals, underhanded negotiations, and skimming millions from the government. In this, he was of course no different from countless businessmen with parents who were outwardly human. And that was fine with him. Unlike his two simian siblings, he had no wish to stand out. All he wanted to do was get disgustingly rich, and if he managed to destroy some companies and lives along the way, that was just icing on the cake.
Jibber and Jebber both went into politics, gladdening Daddy’s heart. Carefully guided every day by legions of Daddy’s family retainers, the two monkeyboys did well. In time, both were elected governors of large states.
Jebber had never lost the habit of covering up his face and then spreading his fingers and peeking out. The voters in his state were enchanted by the gesture. It reassured them that he could quite literally see no evil. That seemed a good reason to vote for him.
Jibber had kept up his habit of gibbering meaninglessly. The voters in his state were convinced that it must all mean something, and so they voted for him. Besides, he was such a cute little monkey.
This was all occasionally disheartening to the more intelligent and worthy human beings both brothers had defeated, but they kept reminding themselves that “democracy” derives ultimately from an ancient word which means “rule by fools.”
Occasionally, the three brothers still gathered at the family estate to pick lice out of each other’s hair. Photographers were not allowed on the property at such times.
* * * * *
CHAPTER TEN
My dear spawn, at this point, something so awful happened to America that Lukas must talk to you about it directly instead of working through the medium of Malcolm Erskine for fear that Malcolm’s very sanity might be blasted to isolated, wandering engrams by the shocking details.
A dreadful period began that was thereafter referred to in the Longlegs family only as The Interregnum.
To put it briefly, Daddy was defeated in his bid for reelection.
Not only that, he was defeated by a parvenu. Not only that, the parvenu was a highly intelligent man who had been a Rhodes scholar, whereas Daddy, in the words of his own daddy, was not the swiftest yacht in the harbor. Not only that, the parvenu was a genuine Southerner, whereas Daddy was a secret New Englander who only pretended to be a rugged son of the sweltering South. Not only that, the Southerner spoke English in complete, lengthy, well constructed sentences, whereas Daddy’s short utterances were frequently difficult to parse, and indeed sometimes made no sense at all. Not only that, the Southerner’s wife was relatively pretty. Not only that, four years later the Southerner was reelected.
And worse was to come.
Charitable though I, Lukas of Aldebaran, star-dwelling Merskeenian, want to be to all the deeds of my Earthian descendants, I must admit that Daddy’s tenure in office had been a disaster. By the end of that tenure, the nation’s unemployment rate was approaching 95%, the nation’s debt was a number that made even a Merskeenian, used to dealing with truly astronomical figures, blanch, and the national Disgruntlement Index, more popularly known as the How Much Does The President Stink Index, was the highest it had ever been since measurements began.
But after eight years of the presidency of the Southern parvenu, all of this had been reversed. Jobs were being created, money was being made and spent, national harmony was increasing, a mood of peacefulness and hope permeated the country from sea to shining sea and was spreading beyond, and the aforementioned index had plunged.
Something had to be done.
Numerous Republicans vied for the party’s nomination, for the chance to attack the Democrats’ certain nominee, the Southerner’s Vice President, Tom Moore. There was much consulting in smoke-filled rooms. Deals and throats were cut. Characters were assassinated. Fancy was told to go suck an egg.
Fancy? Gone’s w
ife, the former First Lady, the gray eminence, the power behind the throne, she of the stiff smile and stiff back?
Yes, that Fancy. Gone was far too gone to run by now, even if the 22nd Amendment hadn’t forbidden it. So Fancy saw herself as the savior of the nation and the party. Who else could win back the White House for the Republican Party but the near-widow of the near-dead Great Combobulator?
Of course she would have preferred to have my imprimatur, as delivered through Malcolm. She decided to forego that because Malcolm’s powers of communication had suddenly deteriorated. He could tell her nothing of any use, and when pressed by her, he grew fearful and babbled. This made Fancy so angry that she had Zip Muchley remove Malcolm to a special location where he was held incommunicado in a damp basement, chained to a wall. Fancy planned to keep him there until after her inauguration, after which she would have him tortured with hot pokers. Not because he possessed information anyone wanted or anything of that sort, but simply because her former admiration for Malcolm had changed to a deep, cold hatred and she wanted to hear him scream. For now, she visited him daily to hear him whimper.
“My athlete’s foot has flared up because of the dampness,” he would whine. “And it itches horribly. And I can’t reach it.”
Fancy would laugh and say, “The hot pokers will make you forget all about your athlete’s foot.”
“Why me?” Malcolm said. “Why, why, why, why, why?”
“You told me that Lukas said I would be the successor to Gone’s successor. I based all my plans and hopes on what you claimed Lukas predicted. Obviously you were incompetent or lying, because that obnoxious fellow and his horrid wife got into the White House after Gone’s successor, instead of me. I don’t believe you really speak for Lukas of Aldebaran at all.”
Business Secrets from the Stars Page 19