Boomsday

by Christopher Buckley

  “Perhaps the congresspersons will marvel at the completion of the pouring of the concrete at the forward air base paving at Grzyluk,” Cass said. “I have the press release here. The corporal’s fingers are still warm from typing it. Pure Shakespeare, if the corporal is permitted to indulge in professional self-satisfaction. Sir.”

  “The captain passed out several times from excitement in the course of reading it. He’s recommending the corporal for the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

  “Eagles spin the way. Hooah, hooah.”

  Captain Drimpilski blew his nose into a paper napkin. He had a head cold. Everyone at Camp Bravo had a head cold. The country had a head cold and was capable, historically speaking, of passing it on to the entire continent.

  “This one’s a biggie,” he said. “Sits on the Imperial Overstretch Committee. He is not a supporter of our mission here. That’s a matter of record, not a personal criticism.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “Jepperson, Democrat of Massachusetts. Good-looking type. More family money than God. Old family. He’s related to Uncle John Sedgwick.”

  “Who, sir?”

  “Look it up, Corporal. Civil War. A good Public Affairs officer knows his—her—military history.”

  “General Sedgwick, sir? The one killed at Spotsylvania by the—”

  “Yes, Corporal,” Captain Drimpilski said with a thwarted air.

  “The corporal reads books, sir,” Cass said with a mildly apologetic air. “When off-duty.”

  Captain Drimpilski went back to his VIPVIS form. “He’s related to someone else. Revolutionary era. It would appear, Corporal, that a veritable river of blue blood runs through the congressman.” He read: “‘Harvard.’ Where else? Didn’t the corporal go to Yale?”

  “Negative, sir. Complicated story.”

  Drimpilski continued with the briefing. “The congressman dates movie stars. Went out with what’s-’er-name, the rock star’s ex-wife, the one who is continually expressing her conviction that the United States should dispatch troops to every starving country in the world, while simultaneously denouncing U.S. military presence in every part of the world. Venezuelan—”

  “Honduran, sir. Nickname of ‘the Tegucigalpa Tamale,’ if the corporal is not mistaken.”

  Drimpilski stared.

  “The corporal also reads glossy magazines,” Cass said. “When not composing Shakespearean-quality media advisories pertaining to our mission here. Sir.”

  Captain Drimpilski said in a paternal sort of way, “Watch out for yourself, Corporal. Just . . .watch out.”

  “The corporal will conduct herself in a manner befitting the United States Army, sir. Failing that, the corporal will engage the congressman in close-quarter combat.”

  Most codels flew directly from the States into Turdje. On the way back, however, they typically stopped “to refuel” at Humphausen AFB, Germany, for the reason that there was a PX there that would make Wal-Mart look like a mom-and-pop corner store. There the codel could shop tax-free, with forklifts that would deliver their year’s supply of liquor and electronics onto C-5 Galaxy stratolifter cargo planes. They would fly on to their home districts with pictures taken with the troops. These they would post on their websites and send out in newsletters, accompanied by truly moving descriptions of what they had seen: “I have just returned from visiting with our brave men and women overseas, who are doing the hard work of spreading democracy and American ideals. And as I look back on this truly moving experience, I can only ask myself, Where do we get such men and women?” The last line was from the James Michener Korean War movie The Bridges at Toko-Ri, a favorite insert among Capitol Hill speechwriters, updated to include, “and women.”

  “Congressman? Sir, we’ll be landing at Turdje momentarily.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant.”

  Congressman? Randolph K. Jepperson was tapping on his laptop. One of the nice things about being a United States congressman and flying about on military transports was that no bossy flight attendant told you to fasten your seat belt and put away your electronic devices. One time, on his way into the DMZ in Korea, the landing was hard and two officious senators got hurled against the bulkhead, to the quiet satisfaction of the warrant officer whose suggestion to them that they strap themselves in had been waved off.

  Congressman Jepperson pecked away: “It is the general rule among policy makers to insist that America must never leave a mission unaccomplished, no matter how wrongheaded or ill thought through. Indeed, the more wrongheaded and ill thought through, the more imperative it is to remain and see it through to its dismal and inevitable end.”

  He reread the paragraph, smiled, and thought, Not bad, old bean. It was an op-ed piece that he would send to The New York Times on his return from Bosnia. He knew that, really, he should wait to write it after his fact-finding mission to Bosnia. He hushed his offended conscience by making a deal with himself that he’d take out the sentences if he saw anything that changed his mind. (Not likely.) He closed the lid of the laptop as the wheels of the large cargo plane announced with a squeak and puff of vaporized rubber that he was now in the Balkans. Randy liked these jaunts. They were his foreign policy credentials, all part of the Grand Plan.

  Randolph Kumberling Jepperson IV was a blue blood in a red meat business. His great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granduncle had signed the Declaration of Independence. The family referred privately to their ancestor as “G-7” and to the sacred document as “the Dec.”

  G-7’s great-great-nephew was the aforementioned General John Sedgwick, distinguished veteran of many Civil War battles, esteemed and beloved comrade of General Ulysses S. Grant, and now a Trivial Pursuit subject, owing to the peculiar circumstances of his demise. The family referred to him as “Elephant Man” or “Poor John.”

  Randy’s great-grandfather (on the maternal Kumberling side) had been governor of Massachusetts in the 1880s. His paternal grandfather, Josephus Agrippa Jepperson, enlarged the already considerable family fortune by cornering the world supply of feldspar just as demand for aluminosilicate was peaking. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed him U.S. ambassador to Belgium at an especially tense time in U.S.-Belgian relations. His intervention in the Fleming-Walloon crisis of 1938 proved critical. He donated the opulent Palais Feldspar outside Genk, with the stipulation that the Flemings and Walloons must stop their feuding, which he termed “surely the most pointless squabble in all Europe.” He was knighted by King Leopold III and received the title of Chevalier des Pantalons Blancs (Knight of the White Pants), one of the most sought-after honorifics in Belgium.

  The mantle of family greatness rested uneasily on the shoulders of Randy’s father, Minturn Jepperson. He experienced his first nervous breakdown halfway through a lackluster academic career at Harvard and one night set fire to the history section of the Widener Library. The episode was covered up, and a new history section was donated by the Jepperson Foundation.

  Minturn was sent off to a Swiss sanatorium for a cure consisting of aggressive colonic irrigation and primal screaming. (The two therapies rather complemented each other.) It was on his return by ship to the United States that he met and fell in love with Adelaide Pankhurst Pitts, only daughter of Henry Hootz Pitts, chairman of Great Lakes Everything, which, true to its name, controlled more or less all commerce on the lakes. Minturn’s parents tried to discourage their son’s affection for “Addie” on the grounds that Hootz “sounded Jewish.”

  When Minturn refused to break it off, the Jeppersons quietly hired a team of genealogists to find out if their potential in-laws were in fact of the tribe of Abraham. When the genealogists reported that the aboriginal Hootz (Gotmunder Von Hutz, 1436–1491) was not only not Jewish, but a direct lineal descendant of the Holy Roman Emperor Odobard II, they breathed a quiet sigh of relief and allowed nature to take its course. It didn’t hurt that Addie stood to inherit her father’s fortune, estimated at over $800 million, no small sum in the late 1940s.

>   Minturn and Addie married and spawned three children, the first of whom they named Randolph IV. (Randy’s siblings called him “Intra-Venous.” The Jeppersons, like many aristocratic families, were keen on nicknames.) Minturn had more “episodes” (eventually diagnosed as atypical psychosis or bipolar disorder). He developed a morbid horror of rushing water and loud noises, thought to trace to his stay in Switzerland. He also took to making strange birdlike sounds, often at inappropriate moments—in the middle of dinner with important guests, in church, at board meetings. But it provided his wife with a cue by which to explain his increasing absences owing to more stays at various psychological institutions. “Daddy’s gone bird-watching again, darling.”

  Despite all this, Addie provided her children with a normal-for-that-era New England WASP upbringing, nourishing them on bland, overcooked food, hiring German nannies who spanked them at every opportunity, and packing them off to grim, Episcopalian boarding schools at the age of eleven. With the children gone, Addie settled down to a life of bridge, committee meetings, and gin and tonics. She became a pillar of Boston society, dowager and standard-bearer of the long Jepperson line.

  Such were the strands of Randolph K. Jepperson IV’s DNA.

  Whatever skeletons rattled about in the family closet—or foyer, for that matter—Randy had a sunny disposition, though in times of stress he sometimes made a low humming noise that sounded like Mmmmmmm.

  “Randolph,” his mother would command, “stop making that preposterous noise!”

  Randy went to Harvard. He studied hard, got good grades, and was popular, especially with women, owing to his good looks and easy laughter. The Porsche convertible and cigarette boat he kept at a marina on the Charles River didn’t hurt, either, along with the picnic hampers packed with Champagne, foie gras, and the very best Moroccan hashish. He never dropped the family name; he comped the Crimson, became editorial page editor, and wrote well-regarded denunciations of President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts. In a development that caused a huge fracas in the family, he turned down the prestigious AD club on the grounds that it was a “marble shithouse.”

  After graduating, Randy spent a year in the Peace Corps trying to interest Peruvians in water purification and crop rotation, but for the most part snorting an Andean-size mountain of high-quality and inexpensive cocaine. He stayed up until dawn in his rented villa writing letters home to half a dozen girlfriends, hinting that he was actually in the CIA and tracking Abimael Guzmán of the Shining Path.

  When he came home at the end of that snowy Wanderjahr morose, he was unrecognizable. He had long, not very clean hair and a beard. A year of stimulants had left him with an involuntary humming that was now incessant. His conversation, once bubbly and witty, was now less than scintillating. He talked of returning to Peru to “finish the job,” which didn’t really convince anyone. His girlfriends made excuses not to see him. His mother threatened to cut off his allowance.

  Appearing downstairs one afternoon after sleeping until five p.m., he was confronted by his mother, who said to him, “You’re too young to have a midlife crisis. Pull yourself together. If you continue at this rate, you’ll end up in the loony bin like your father. Or being born-again. I don’t know which is more boring. And will you stop making that appalling sound!”

  One day, on the way into Boston to see a psychiatrist that his mother had insisted on—it was either that or leave the house and no more allowance—Randy dropped three hits of windowpane.

  It was a peculiar way of striking back at his mother—seeing her shrink while tripping on a monster dose of LSD—but it had a kind of logic to it. Navigating on the highway into Boston became, well, complicated. At one point he looked up, and there, among the strange giant birds that were circling and trying to eat him, he saw, off Exit 15, the John F. Kennedy Library, its I. M. Pei design doing . . .whoa . . .amazing things. It occurred to him, through the tsunami of hallucinations, that he had never actually been inside. Carpe diem! It was much more alluring than the prospect of freaking out in front of Dr. Goldberg, so he turned off onto the exit—a breathtaking and very nearly life-ending maneuver. His parking was irregular and attracted the interest of several security guards, but he managed to ditch the car and make it inside without being arrested.

  He stood in the cathedral-high glassed-in pavilion lobby looking at the sea and the sky and had himself a life-changing epiphany. It dawned on him that he too had a Boston accent, was good-looking, smart, Harvard educated, filthy rich, and—at least before he began vacuuming cocaine up his nose—a world-quality cocksman, a bantam rooster in any henhouse. He heard a voice—JFK’s voice. It said, Go for it.

  Four years later, after a rocky start or two, Randolph K. Jepperson had been elected to a seat in Congress. Some might say he had bought himself a seat. The sniggers of his colleagues soon began, and he found himself saddled with a new nickname: Randolph “He’s No Jefferson” Jepperson IV. But he was determined that they would not be laughing for long.

  Corporal Cohane stood at semiattention as the Air Force C-21A taxied to a stop. She’d done some more reading up on Rep. R. K. Jepperson. The Almanac of American Politics noted his distinguished DNA, his focus on foreign policy—domestic policy being pretty dull stuff. He’d used his connections to finagle a seat on the House Armed Forces Overseas Projection Oversight Committee, dubbed the “Committee on Imperial Overstretch.” This would be the reason for his visit to the Beautiful Balkans.

  She doubted he’d come for the PX goodies on the return flight. According to Forbes, he was one of the richest men in Congress, with a personal fortune “in excess of $100 million.” (Addie had relented in the matter of the allowance after what the family called Randy’s “Great Awakening.”) This and his striking good looks made him the most eligible bachelor in Washington. More than one glossy magazine had run a profile of him with the title “The Next JFK?” He had a huge house in Georgetown and, indeed, as Captain Drimpilski had noted, “dated movie stars.” He’d had a two-year-long “thing” with the Tegucigalpa Tamale. His mother was quoted in Vanity Fair calling her a “Honduran tramp.” That must have made for a lively Thanksgiving dinner, Cass thought.

  She studied the photos of him. He looked like the sort of person whose great-great-whatever had signed the Declaration of Independence. He was six feet two, trim, broad in the shoulders, a bit storklike, which gave him a needed touch of vulnerability, as if he might blow over in a strong wind. He had pale blue eyes, a nose that had been handed down since the Mayflower, and creased cheeks. He looked like a flesh-and-blood bust done by a distinguished sculptor. It could have a cruel face, but the eyes twinkled and suggested self-awareness and bemusement at his abundant good fortune. And now here he was, approaching her. She had to shout above the high-pitched whine of the jet turbines even as they spiraled slowly to a stop.

  “Congressman Jepperson? Corporal Cohane, sir. Army Public Affairs. Welcome to—”

  “Well named, isn’t it?”

  “Sir?”

  “Turd-je!”

  “Yes, sir. If you’ll follow me . . .our vehicle is this way.”

  Cass climbed into the driver’s seat of the Humvee, the congressman the passenger seat. His elegant frame and aristocratic bearing seemed somewhat out of context in such a spare, utilitarian space.

  He smiled and took her in.

  “Cohane, is it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Lovely name. Irish? Surely.”

  “So I’m told, sir.”

  “Do you know, I have one of these at home in Washington,” he said. “Civilian version, of course. Hummer. Sounds almost indecent, doesn’t it? Hummer. I’ll pick you up in my . . .Hummer.” He chuckled to himself.

  Strange duck, Cass thought. This information that he drove a car that got about fifty yards to the gallon hardly squared with the Almanac’s description of him as a “staunch environmentalist.”

  As if reading Cass’s mind, he added, “I don’t drive it. Just keep it at home. You know.
In the event.”

  “Event, sir?”

  “I’m sorry. What’s your first name?”

  “Cassandra?”

  He smiled. “You don’t sound very sure. Do you have your baptismal certificate on you? We could check.”

  “Cass. Sir.” She smiled back.

  “Tell you what, Cass, sir . . .if you’ll stop calling me ‘sir,’ which makes me feel a hundred years old, I’ll start calling you Cass. Deal?”

  “Okay.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Cass.” He looked out the window. “I’d forgotten how dreary it is here.”

  Cass said, “I’m sorry it’s just me, but the VIPVIS—the Pentagon—indicated that you didn’t want a large escort. The captain would gladly have—”

  “No, no, no, this is fine. Hate entourages.” He pronounced it in a French way, en-tour-ahhh-ges. “It’s gotten so out of hand. My God, did you see about the president’s motorcade in Beijing last week? Fifty-four cars long? Imperial overstretch limousine, I call that. I mean, please. What is it coming to?”

  He looked over, saw Cass’s uncertain expression, and said, “I’m sorry, Cass. I really wasn’t trying to trick you into criticizing the commander in chief. There’s often no filter between what passes from my brain to my mouth. I suppose it’s not his fault. Security being what it is and all. Still, what kind of message does it send to the world when the American president goes about that way? Couldn’t they make do with—fifty cars? Jimmy Carter overdid it—he was president before you were born—but I must say I like the idea of an American president carrying his own garment bag. Humility! Quite my favorite virtue. Not that I possess it in overabundance. No one in Washington seems to, these days. Dear, dear. Harry Truman used to take walks, practically by himself. Those were the days. Can you imagine an American president popping out for a stroll in the park? Où sont les neiges d’antan?”

  “Villon?”