by Michael Oren
Adrianna and Matteo, cradling tea mugs, listened raptly, unsure whether Harriet would help. Not until she completed a surprisingly ribald account of accompanying a king on a road race with Elvis did she finally pause and grin.
“Well?” Matteo hazarded after several moments’ silence.
“I think,” the old woman cackled, more to the cat than to them. “I think I can be of assistance.”
The Hallabys contained themselves until they were clear of the house and almost out of Woodley Park. Only then did they cheer and high-five and hug. They now had Harriet Bravermann on their side, not merely a gun but a cannon.
But they also had that old black four-door behind them, following at a pre-prescribed distance. Inside were two men, both of them shabbier than their car, but just as fixed on the Continental. And they, too, were armed.
Yet the Hallabys never noticed them as, with Harriet Bravermann pushing discreetly from behind, they bounded from one alpine event to the next. Up through the Cabinet, they ascended, to the senior counsels and visiting heads of state. With springtime near and the snow melting, there remained only one more white-crowned mount, stately with porticos.
Then, one sparkling June day, the invitation arrived. The faces of Thomas Jefferson and other Founders watched from the eggshell walls as Adrianna and her husband waltzed around the living room and into the parlor. Crystal jingled against pewter. Serious work resumed soon, though, as she weighed her wardrobe and he brushed up on the news. It was not enough just to stand on the pinnacle, they concluded, they had to stand there with style.
And this was the pinnacle: an intimate dinner in the Lincoln Room on the night of July 4th. The Hallabys’ driver took the long way, crawling up Connecticut, while tourists swarmed toward the Washington Memorial to watch the celebrations. An hour of savoring passed before the Continental finally pulled up to 1600 Pennsylvania. The beat-up black car rolled to a stop thirty yards behind it with killed lights.
The evening exceeded their fantasies. The president could not have been more interested in Matteo’s views on tax reform, leaning sideways to catch his words, and the First Lady could not get over Adrianna’s chiffon A-line and the Mikimoto pearl necklace which, she claimed, belonged to her great-great grandmother. They, too, discussed policy, from international trade to minorities’ rights. The other guests, among them two Nobel Prize winners, a former NFL quarterback, and a bipartisan selection of lawmakers, held forth. The silver shimmered, the candles revolved. Lincoln looked down pensively from the wall.
The Hallabys were the last to leave and the only guests to be personally escorted to the door. Afterward, the President and his wife lingered in the hallway, marveling. “I understand they have some pretty powerful ears, too,” he said, and she added, “Yes, and now they have ours.”
The trek down a mountain is often harder than the climb, and the Hallabys resisted the urge to sprint. They strolled arm-in-arm along the winding drive to the visitors’ gate.
“You did it,” Matteo said, still hesitant to raise his voice.
Adrianna had no problem announcing, “We did!”
“I’m so proud of us.”
“Darling, me too.”
They saluted the guards as they held open the gates. The night was glistening, the air, electric.
“Where do we go now?”
“What?”
Fireworks were bursting over the capital, practically above their heads. Confetti colors rippled across the marble façades and explosions reverberated around the columns. The Hallabys could hardly hear one another.
“What did you say?”
“I said, where do we go from here?”
“Where? I’ll tell you where…”
But he never finished the answer. Nearby tourists thought the booms and flashes came from the display. None lowered their gazes long enough to see the dented black car speeding away. Nobody noticed—not that it would have mattered—the pair of riddled bodies on the curb.
News of the Hallabys’ elimination stunned Washington. Embassies, charities, cultural institutions, all expressed the profoundest shock. The White House, too, put out a statement. Matteo and Adrianna were, the President said, “generous philanthropists, committed civic servants, and great Americans.” He swore to track down their assassins, who were purported to be either Mexican drug dealers or Iranian spies or both. Their identities remained unknown but not so their motives. The Hallabys died, so the wisdom held, because they knew too much and moved in ultra-sensitive circles.
All of D.C. lamented, but few attended the funeral. Apart from a clergyman of indeterminate faith and pall bearers paid for by the estate, almost no one was on hand to mourn. Only Billington, with Harriet Bravermann leaning heavily on her arm, stayed for the first part of the service but left before the caskets were lowered.
“They gave good table,” Billington rued with the graves behind her.
“Yes,” Harriet agreed, “and they got it.”
A Cure for
Suburban Boredom
Outside of the convenience store, I watch the digital clock on my dashboard and wait for it to read 11:45. That is the time I chose—quite arbitrarily—to act.
Occasionally, my stare wanders to other objects. The store itself, which seems to float in gelatin, and its feeble customer stream. Working people, from the look of them: Caterpillar caps, indifferently fitting jeans, dreadlocks, a determination to tattoo every inch of skin. They enter and exit grimly with their cigarettes and six-packs, many wolfing down doughnuts. The clock, the store, the customers, and, once in a while, the tawny oilcloth roll on the seat next to me catches my eye. Only then I admit why I’m here.
Such moments, in fact, are my only wakeful ones. The rest are spent dreamily appearing as the company man, the family man, the man who could be counted on never to do anything undependable. A life that bores me so comprehensively that I cannot imagine how it fails to put others to sleep. And yet, that very sameness brings me distinction, whether from my wife, our children, colleagues at work, or the people we reflexively label friends. A good man, a principled man, they call me. A pillar of the community, if community is indeed what he had.
What he possesses, really, is this one secret self. The one that could never be suspected. And the self that, just minutes before 11:45, whispers to me the truth about who and what I am.
And what I am, what I live for, is frisson. The jacked-up state that infuses the dashboard dials, the spattered windshield, even the asphalt outside, with life. The sense that what I am about to do—what I’ve done before but never dared to think I’d repeat—is somehow preventable while at the same time, I know it isn’t. This is the moment when everything else, from reading the morning paper to commuting and drifting through my day, becomes fiction. This, now, with only a few moments to go, is reality. This and the oilcloth carefully folded on the seat next to me.
Will I get caught? No chance! And, yes, of course I will. Those mutually exclusive, mutually inevitable scenarios—what sharper source of thrill and horror? Nothing, not rock climbing or hang gliding or deep-sea diving, competes. No booze, no drug. And nothing, I admit while pulling on the mask, leaves me more exposed. And though it’s nearly midnight, I’ve never been more awake.
The clock says 11:43 and I imagine the numbers branded on my cheek. My knuckles, gnarled around the steering wheel, seem so white now, I half-fear they’ll attract attention. Another customer, obese and wobbling buoy-like, waddles out of the glass doors with a family-sized bag of popcorn. I count his tormented steps. I count my breaths, shortening.
A digit flips. Seconds race to keep pace with my heartbeats. But ultimately there is no alarm, no buzz or even a tremor. Merely a faint crack of joints as one hand unfurls and stretches toward the oilcloth.
The other hand finds the door handle and lifts it, slowly, releasing my true self into the night. Ready to be wicked and inexplicable. Preparing, as I stride toward the light, to be.
Skirmish on
Chick
amaw Ridge
Fog thick as hay bundles hid the tree line. One could barely see the trunks, much less the vines and undergrowth. From inside the forest came the squawk of chickadees, croaking frogs, and countless insects clicking. But, through the mist and the din, other noises emerged. The suck of boots in swamp mud, the clang of steel on tin. And one more sound: darrump, darrump, like some urgently repetitive message. And then the forms, slowly assuming dimension, gradually coalescing into a tattered line of men. Weather-worn but determined, they formed at the edge of the field.
“Company halt!” an officer shouted, and the marching ceased.
Dressed in butternut and grey with an assortment of hats—hardees and kepis—and with their Springfields still shouldered, they stood facing a row of cross-picket fences and a stirring patch of meadow.
“Present arms!” the officer continued. “Fix bayonets!”
From belts and scabbards, a hundred blades flickered in the fresh morning’s sun.
“Prepare to advance! On my command, double-time, march!”
And they marched, weapons leveled, through the knee-high pasture. Drums thumping, Stars and Bars fluttering overhead, they neared the fences and began to pick up their pace.
“Steady men! Steady!”
“Steady men. Steady,” a different officer ordered, but almost in a whisper, on the opposite side of the fence. As the tip of the flags and the first of enemy’s sword-tips quivered over the rise, other muzzles lowered.
This officer and his men wore blue, though, and their uniforms were braided and crisp. Their flags, with stripes instead of bars, snapped defiantly over the formation.
So the two forces converged, ineluctably, on this field as they did on innumerable and often nameless fields in this ferocious war between brothers. And here, as in so many clashes, real brothers actually fought. Wilfred, in line with the rebels, assaulted his little sibling Jeb, standing his ground as a Yank. Fifty paces were all that remained before they shot at one another to kill.
And they were ready to kill, to maim first then murder, without hesitation or mercy. Mutually hostile since childhood, Wilfred resented Jeb’s better looks, his quicker brain, his way with finances and women. One woman in particular, the love of Wilfred’s youth, now called Jeb husband. Jeb, in turn, accused Wilfred of cheating their father—long deceased—out of all his lands and savings, of altering his will to make him, the firstborn, his heir.
To say that they hated one another was to admit the inadequacy of the verb. They lived on opposite fringes of the town, belonged to irreconcilable churches, campaigned for candidates ready to duel, and spat at the uttering of their nemesis’ name. Their sole agreement, implicitly reached, was that the east side of Main Street belonged to Wilfred and the west to Jeb, so that the two could not randomly meet.
Such men did not need a war to battle. Without grapeshot and Minié balls, each could have torn his brother’s innards out with his fingernails. And so, when the time came to pick sides, the two chose the one most likely to put the other in his sights.
Indeed, as the opposing lines converged, the brothers began their search. It would not be difficult. In addition to his slower mind, the older man was ungainly, wide at the mid-section, and in no shape to keep up with fleet-footed recruits. His spectacles glittered in the thickening light. The younger man similarly stood out. Flamboyant even in civilian clothes, Jeb in uniform preened himself with golden epaulettes and a bright purple plume in his hatband. Rarely in this war did enemies so savage make themselves such discernible targets.
“Steady, men. Hold your fire,” urged the Union commander as first the heads and then the torsos of the Confederates came into view. With his thumb, Jeb cocked the hammer on his carbine. Huffing, struggling to keep up, Wilfred did the same. Yet, no sooner did he finish anchoring his weapon’s stock in his armpit than he saw, just beyond the fence, the flash of an officer’s saber followed by a blazing fusillade.
“Fire!” the order reverberated, but from which of the lines no one could tell. Irrespective, men began falling. Slapping their foreheads as if in afterthought, clutching their bellies and chests, they screamed and folded. Once hit by a Minié ball, their chances for survival were few. A spinning projectile of hot, hollow lead, a massive .58 caliber, the Minié shattered bones and splattered organs. There was little left for a surgeon to sew. But none of today’s wounded would ever see a surgeon. The meadow depressed with bodies.
And still the fighting raged. Swiftly, mechanically, the soldiers spread their boots at right angles and planted a wooden butt between them. They reached into cases and rucksacks and fished for a paper cartridge, ripped off a corner with their teeth, and poured the contents down the barrel. Unsheathing ramrods, they ran the charges through and then they raised their rifles to hip-level. Pulled back hammers and crowned the nipples with a percussion cap priming their weapons. Only then, did they carefully take aim and, with a beckoning movement, close a finger on the trigger.
The blast bruised their shoulders. The smoke blinded and nearly choked them, and their mouths ran black with powder. Still, a well-drilled soldier could get off three or more shots every minute, and both Jeb and Wilfred were exceptionally drilled. Each fired multiple rounds and were down to their last, very special, cartridge.
By then, both lines were depleted, with those standing drenched beneath their woolen uniforms as the sun ascended to noon. Small arms rattled, less intensely now, and the drums only wearily beat. A cannon blasted a cauliflower of smoke. Wilfred and Jeb placed one another in their crosshairs, held their breaths, and shot.
The killing would persist until every last man lay prone and unshifting in the grass—or so it seemed. But, suddenly, a voice came down from on high. An otherworldly voice—a woman’s—that might have begged her sons to cease this fratricide and reduce their muskets into mantelpieces. But, instead, the voice, accompanied by an ear-spitting electric screech, announced, “Let’s all give a huge round of applause for our boys!”
Another crackle, not of sparks on powder this time but of a thousand palms on palms. Whistles and cheering, too. And, as if in some messianic vision, one by one, the fallen rose. They wiped the dirt from their pants and tunics, picked up their kepis, and hoisted their replica guns. Once again, the men approached the cross-picket fence but individually now, with no care for lines, and with hands rather than bayonets extended. Slapping dusty shoulders, they waded through the pasture toward the banner proclaiming “Chickamaw Ridge” and an array of refreshment tables.
Children hugged their father’s knees, grandfathers posed for family photos, and the townspeople continued to applaud. Holly brought her husband a hotdog and a beer. “Best battle ever,” she laughed. “For a moment there, I thought this time the South would win.”
He laughed too, a little nervously at first but soon with his usual bravura. “No way. Johnny Reb ain’t never getting past me. Ever again.”
“But honey,” Holly said, half-disconcerted, “I think you’ve been wounded.”
She pointed at a glistening stain spreading down her husband’s pants. But he just snickered. “It’s just water, silly. My canteen must’ve spilled.”
He held up the tin flask—an original, purchased on eBay—to show her. Only Holly didn’t smile. She didn’t sweep off his plumed hat as she usually did after the annual re-enactment, twirl his epaulettes and whisper, “Let’s go home, hero, and get some real action.” Rather, her violet lips parted, and her lovely sunburnt face blanched. In the dead center of the flask was a jagged hole just the width, she knew, of a Minié ball.
“Jeb…,” she began, only to be interrupted by a scream.
One of the event’s volunteers, a retired nurse, was cleaning up the field and chanced upon Wilfred. Sprawled face-up with his paunch barely concealed by the blades of grass, his glasses refracted the sun. He might have been resting—the battle was a bit much for a man of his condition—except for his hardened expression of hate. Except for the hole, much like the one in J
eb’s canteen, in his forehead.
Penitence
“One spring night, David roamed his palace, and, from the roof, he saw a beautiful woman bathing. ‘Find out who that woman is,’ the king ordered one of his servants. Her name was Bathsheba, and, turns out, she was the wife of David’s own general, Uriah. But that didn’t stop the king. He had Bathsheba brought to his bed.”
I always adored watching my husband preach. From the front pew where I sat with our sons, Timothy and Luke, I looked up at him as teenaged girls once ogled Elvis. Though Nathan was anything but flashy. Earthy’s more like it, and compassionate. Especially compassionate, with a power to bring peace to the most tormented hearts.
And many hearts were anguished. Throughout the country, yes, but disproportionately, it seemed, in our church. First there was women’s ordination, then gay marriage and gay clergy. Matters that went unuttered in my childhood were suddenly discussed in Sunday School. Those once branded sinners became, just by “coming out,” heroes.
From his pulpit, Nathan went on. “When David found out that Bathsheba was pregnant, he sent Uriah back to battle, in the front lines where he was sure to be killed. And he was.”
The congregation gasped, as if hearing this Old Testament tale for the first time. But everybody of course knew the story, and the gasp was their usual response to Nathan’s sermons—quiet, learned, intense. From his unadorned pulpit, in his dove-grey vestment and its small, crimson cross, he looked out at us with an expression of rapt sincerity, of empathy for every soul.
That is the reason why, while controversies splintered other communities, ours flourished. Other mainline churches stood empty—the First Presbyterian down the road was recently sold to a bank—but our pews were packed. No, we weren’t born-agains. We studied Bibles, not thumped them, spoke in no tongues other than Midwestern English. Yet people flocked to us. To the Reverend Nathan Philpot who, with a soft but principled hand, anchored this church on a rock.