Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel

by Antrim, Donald

“Ben, did you say mines?”

  “Claymores. That jerk Mr. Benson planted them. We’ve located some but we don’t have the technology to disarm or remove them.”

  “We?”

  “Me and my dad.”

  “How is your dad?” I knew Chuck Webster from PTA meetings. Years before, when Ben was little and attending grade school, Chuck Webster had been a friendly and supportive presence at our bimonthly open-house conferences concerning core curriculum and dress codes. His input was always appreciated by the teaching staff, who felt from him a sensitivity unusual in the lay community, to the diverse and often contradictory objectives—the whole “socialization versus individuation: which to encourage?” problem, with its attendant classroom dilemmas around issues of fair grading for “fast” and “slow” learners, how to reward effort, whether to encourage interdisciplinarianism, etc.—of primary education. Ben said, “Dad’s okay, I guess. Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

  “Friend or foe?” a man’s voice called from the shadows.

  “It’s me, Dad,” Ben whispered back.

  Chuck Webster stepped out. He wore a drab and dark military night-ordnance ensemble exactly like his son’s. Additionally, the elder Webster carried a semiautomatic assault weapon slung over his shoulder. He looked intimidating behind his rakish, thin mustache, but he sounded hospitable, neighborly, when he said, “Well, if it isn’t Pete Robinson. What brings you to the park, Pete?”

  “Oh, nothing.” Right away I was aware that this was a stupid thing to declare, even to apparently nonhostile types, within an arena, as this clearly was, of suspicion. I said, “So, what’s up?”

  “You’re lucky you didn’t lose a leg or your foot, Pete. You’re lucky Ben was nearby.”

  We were standing in a clearing. An owl hooted. The night felt unseasonably warm.

  “Pete, we’ve got surplus protective gear back at the house, I’m sure we could fit you up. It would be a shame for anything to happen to you. You’re a valuable asset to this community. You have to teach our youngsters to make a better world than the one we’ve made. Am I right?”

  “Right, Chuck.”

  “Actually, Dad, Mr. Robinson always spent a lot of class time lecturing about war and killing and torture and things,” Ben Webster said.

  “I’m sure your teacher was merely highlighting the tragic and beautiful history of human conflict. Isn’t that the case, Pete?”

  “Something like that.”

  Chuck pointed through the trees. “There’s plenty of struggle tonight in Turtle Pond Park, Pete.”

  Sure enough, I could detect distant shadowy forms of people moving. I felt remorse—it was momentary, a swift and transitory psychic experience containing awareness of various realities: the reality of the foot; of my growing guilt and shame around the issue of my failure, the night of Jim’s death, to intervene and turn the tide of vengeance, to administer beneficent justice; the sad fact of Meredith’s coelacanth dreams, her drum-accompanied departure for mental seas where our life together was beside the point. And the school situation. Ben’s presence brought up all the feelings of contrition I’d been repressing, concerning my clear willingness to sit around in my comfortable kitchen and formulate “home school” plans, then do nothing in the way of follow-up. Chuck Webster was right, I had a job to do. And if I got it together now, the home school that is—if I got it together now, we could be looking at practically a complete school year ahead.

  I knelt beside Ben, who was observing, through infrared goggles, a mini-battalion of allegedly invidious neighbors snaking along a narrow footpath that traversed the southern sector of the park.

  “Hey Ben, how’d you like to be a big player in the future of this town?”

  “Me?”

  “Your science fair essay on rising sea levels lives in my memory as one of the finest examples of third-grade student research I’ve encountered in my career. You’re a dedicated thinker who understands intellectual thoroughness and the value of knowledge. I’d be proud to have your help recruiting students for the school I plan to open.”

  “School?”

  “Admittedly your credentials are thin. You’re not a high school graduate yet. What grade would you be now, anyway?”

  “Tenth.”

  “That’s pretty far along. Plus you have real-world experience. That’s worth a lot. Let’s say you have graduate equivalency.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now you’re eligible for employment within the educational system.”

  “Great.”

  “I’ll need your Social Security number. I’ll have to see a birth certificate. We’ll start you out at a reasonable hourly rate to be negotiated later.”

  We shook hands, and Ben whispered across the clearing, “Dad, guess what, I got a job!” But his father was nowhere to be seen.

  Ben scampered across the clearing. He scanned the perimeter with the night-vision goggles. He called out in earnest, hushed tones, “Dad, Dad.”

  Nighttime shadows dappled the forest’s undergrowth and ground; the whole world challenged perception. I could distinguish, with certainty, only Ben, some nearby branches, and the nickel shimmer on the barrel of the unholstered handgun in his hand, when Ben came close and whispered, “Thanks for the career opportunity, Mr. Robinson, but Dad and I made a vow. If he’s harmed, I must hunt down and discharge a bullet into the heart of the person responsible.”

  The dark shapes previously roving the southern trail were no longer in evidence. I tried to make light of the situation. “Look, your father probably just went off to conduct some reconnaissance.”

  Fear was in the boy’s voice when he said, “Dad wouldn’t go on maneuvers without telling me.”

  He stepped into the woods. “Can’t hang around. Dad’s in trouble. Check you later.”

  “Hey, wait a minute, Ben. What’s going on with you guys and the Bensons?”

  But it was too late, he was gone, vanished into the shrubs, leaving me alone and without insight into the apparent disharmony between the two families.

  I stood beneath the spooky trees. The night was quiet. I took off the knapsack, reached in and fished out the trowel. Clouds parted overhead to reveal a few stars. The clearing was, actually, an ideal burial setting—it had all the right qualities. Could I reasonably risk shoveling earth, lighting candles, and reciting incantations in a vicinity likely to be overrun by kin groups brandishing private arsenals? Yes. There was something fitting about it. It was my purpose: to render a symbolic narrative of regeneration, using pieces of Jim as literal embodiments of life transformed—in this case the Foot, which walks over land, alerting us to textures, temperatures, feelings. The burial of Jim’s foot would underscore the pain of physical existence, while attesting to the mortality of the middle-to-high-income households currently vying for control of Turtle Pond Park.

  Down I knelt. Twigs and leaves and rocks were everywhere. I heaped them into a pile. The cleared tract was level and hard against the rounded blade of the trowel plunging in, scraping noisily; I crouched low and bent over, using my body as a baffle against the grainy rasp of steel on dirt. Cautiously I dug. Pebbles bit into my knees. It wasn’t long before I had a sore back and neck. There was a lot of tension that night in the park, all the tension that naturally accompanies proximity to armed strife. Sweat ran into my eyes, and I leaned back and raised a hand to wipe away the salt sting; and I reflected on Chuck Webster’s eerie disappearance. He’d been standing no more than twenty feet from where Ben and I had convened to talk business. Suddenly, he was gone. It wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to have happening in a civic recreational space.

  I set aside the trowel and rummaged in the pack, took out The Egyptian Book of the Dead and placed it beside the burial site. The plastic-wrapped foot was soggy. Holding it up, now, up above the shallow hole in the ground (fingers caressing instep, thumb pressing ankle), I experienced, for the second time that night, a thrill of attachment to the man it had belonged to, and I knew I was do
ing the right thing, bringing Jim’s foot to the embattled park. This little clearing, like Jim’s own neatly clipped lawn that dark night of his passing, was sacred space.

  I laid the foot beside the grave. Salty ocean breezes bent limbs of trees into arabesques, making the world a church. I lit a candle, opened the book at random, and read aloud:

  “‘I am a shining being, and a dweller in light, who hath been created and hath come into existence from the limbs of the god.’”

  Not bad. But what did it mean, really? There was no way for me to know, only to speculate. I’m not an Egyptologist. My previous studies of comparative religion have been confined to medieval Christian variants prominent in the Germanic and Mediterranean regions during assorted state-sanctioned periods of witch and heretic hunting, when ecclesiastical nuance determined the destiny of illiterate, cowed populations. The Inquisition is an archetypal instance of nonsecular terrorism—it’s a template for institutionalized cruelties that have abided throughout modern history. Back when Jim was still alive, back before the ex-mayor, without warning or explanation, launched those shoulder-fired Stinger missiles—and where did a guy like Kunkel get that kind of firepower, anyway? Clearly, high office has its perks—into the Botanical Garden reflecting pool, thus bringing down all manner of pain—a week or so before this happened I gave my standard talk, at a Rotary luncheon, on this very topic: “The Barbarity of the Past: How Ancient Fears Inform the Organizing Principles and Moral Values of Modern Life.”

  That lecture, I realized now, holding the sputtering birthday candle in one hand and the archaic burial manual in the other—that lecture was a kind of starting point in the chain of circumstance that had brought me to this dangerous glade to perform esoteric nocturnal rites.

  Could I ever have seen any of this coming, that late-summer Friday at the Holiday Inn?

  It was a capacity crowd. Jerry and Rita Henderson sat up front. Bill and Barbara Nixon lounged at a neighboring table. I noticed Abraham de Leon picking crumbs from his beard. Tom Thompson chugged cups of coffee. And there was Jim Kunkel himself, looking patriarchal and well tanned but also a bit feeble in yellow pants and golf shirt and shiny white shoes. At that time the old ex-mayor had only a few days to live, but who could know this? Everybody seemed slightly stunned from the volumes of delicately poached blowfish they’d tucked away. It was a tough house. I sipped from my water glass, cleared my throat, leaned close to the microphone and said, “So you see, these dread ministers, the Inquisitors, inflicted every extreme of ruthlessness on reputed heretics, many mere petty criminals or political agitators, not religious activists at all. Ruthlessness on behalf of orthodoxy. It’s the old story. What’s interesting in the case of the Inquisition, and it is a phenomenon that has been demonstrated time and again, in diverse theaters, even right up into the modern era, is the ready accessibility of holy text as a tool of repression.”

  Meredith at the back of the big banquet room smiled encouragement. I went to the portable blackboard behind the podium, picked up a piece of chalk, and began sketching diagrams. “Okay, the rack, an unpretentious stretching device, mechanically rudimentary, employed in the regular daily work of coercion and castigation. The rack’s primary social impact was arguably psychological as well as physical. As long as the authorities had recourse to such an instrument, with liberty to use it at their discretion, which is to say at the slightest provocation, the lay community, understandably, inhabited a condition of low-grade panic.” I raised the chalk to fill in picturesque details: “crank,” “berth,” “leather thongs,” and so on. People shifted in their chairs, leaned forward to get a better view. Jerry Henderson was engrossed, peering at the board. Bill Nixon perked right up. It’s difficult to overestimate the value, as a teaching aid, of pictures. When I used to give this almost identical though considerably more elementary “Inquisition talk” to my third-graders—always a hard-to-please bunch—they, like these grown-ups assembled at the Holiday Inn for Friday luncheon, became enthralled, absolutely, as though on cue, when I marched to the board and picked up the chalk and made fine white renderings of dungeon environments. Suddenly the old classroom would fall silent. No gum popping, no spitballs sailing, no notes being passed. The kids’ eager questions reflected a deep concern for history’s artifacts.

  “Did the torturers leave the people on that thing for a long time?”

  “Did you get taller?”

  “Could you get torn in half?”

  I could sense my adult audience’s yearning to raise their own inquiries, as I casually dropped the chalk in the chalk tray and returned to the podium. I watched Rita Henderson brush lint from her purple blouse. Jerry folded and refolded a napkin. Jim Kunkel chewed a toothpick. I let all these people contemplate the past. “In those days you were guilty until proven innocent.” I took another sip of water. Heads wagged, a fork scraped a plate, ice rattled.

  “Questions, anyone?”

  Jim raised his hand. “Pete, would you say that the past lives on in the present?”

  “Certainly, brutality has long been the order of the day, Jim.”

  “Yep,” he said. Then Barbara Nixon—not a bad-looking woman, incidentally—spoke up. “Mr. Robinson, are you saying that ours is a cruel culture?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I can’t accept that. We’re good people here. We care about one another.”

  “Oh, give it a rest,” Jim growled at her.

  Everyone regarded the ex-mayor.

  “Excuse me?” from Bill.

  “There’s no love here,” was all Jim said.

  Bill told him, “I think you owe my wife an apology.”

  Barbara nudged her husband, “Forget it honey, he’s just a crazy old man.”

  To which Jim replied, to both or either of the Nixons, or maybe—who knows?—to the room in general, “Fuck off.”

  At which point Jerry broke in and diplomatically asked, “What I want to know, Pete, is could you be torn in half on one of those racks?”

  “Probably not. There were, however, methods of accomplishing such punishment.”

  “Drawing and quartering,” said the ex-mayor. There was a feeling, in the room, of unease. I pressed on: “Precisely. The accused is harnessed by hand and foot to four hardy beasts of burden, which are then encouraged by drovers to walk or trot away in different directions.”

  “That’s a powerful image,” said Rita Henderson. Abraham de Leon, who rumor had it was conducting an on-again, off-again affair with his friend Jerry’s wife, added, with an air of nonchalance, “Yes.”

  Everyone nodded agreement. I elaborated: “It’s an image that speaks not only to physical but emotional fragmentation. We say, ‘I’m torn,’ to describe confusion over complex choices. Once upon a time, individuals who challenged received truths were literally torn by oxen or horses. Modern man’s psyche is figuratively torn by internal dilemmas posed in the struggle to escape unconscious prohibitions and taboos passed down from generation to generation.”

  “Sexual taboos?” Barbara Nixon suggested. Did I see her wink? I looked back at Meredith, who was grinning. Bill Nixon was grinning too. Or sneering. Barbara didn’t seem to notice her husband’s sideways gaze on her; she smiled widely and asked, “Is that what you mean, Mr. Robinson?”

  Before I could reply, Bill broke in, rudely, “Of course that’s what he means.”

  “I didn’t ask you, honey.”

  It was an embarrassing moment. Why can’t couples behave? I said, “Sure, sexual, spiritual, intellectual, whatever.”

  “The point being that we’re not supposed to explore our true feelings, or discover our innermost selves.” This from Jim, who rose from his chair and gestured dramatically with a water glass held high; cold water sloshed over the undulating glass’s rim, splashing the carpet and threatening nearby diners, who ducked away. Jerry Henderson cautioned, “Easy with that water, Mr. Mayor,” as icy liquid splashed in a crystal arc over Tom Thompson’s crew-cut head.

  �
�Hey, watch it,” Tom said.

  Jim replaced the glass on the table and grunted, “Sorry.” Tom dried himself with a napkin. Rita Henderson clutched her husband’s hand—tightly. And Barbara Nixon looked up at me looking back at Meredith. We all listened to the decrepit voice of the ex-mayor, flatly proclaiming, “We’re all murderers here.”

  At that moment the banquet hall’s wide metal doors swung open and Bob and Betsy Isaac entered from the kitchen, bearing silver trays laden with pie topped with generous helpings of whipped cream. “Ah, ooh,” people said. In this way, beneath sounds of eating, Jim’s solemn commentary was buried. For the moment at least. Many times after that day I pondered Kunkel’s words. Holding the thawing foot above the grave, I felt engaged in an enactment of prophesy, and I knew my midnight burial signified not only community rebirth and regeneration but also personal genesis. Entombing Jim’s foot was an essential step toward assuming the mantle of civic leadership, becoming mayor. Campaign poster slogans filled my mind: PETE ROBINSON FOR PEACE ON EARTH. PETE ROBINSON, A STEP TOWARD PARADISE.

  The foot grave was two feet deep, not traditional depth, but deep enough (probably?) to discourage animals. I lowered the foot into darkness. I left it tightly freezer-wrapped—the twist-tied plastic, washed in leaking fluids, served admirably as a makeshift shroud. And I set aside The Egyptian Book of the Dead. It was wrong to use it. Wasn’t I just appropriating text from one culture, blindly applying it within another, merely to suit a private agenda? Better to honor my burial scenario with a song born of the moment.

  I improvised: “Proud foot, never again will you walk over grass or road or sidewalk. Once you carried a man on his daily rounds, you carried him through life. Now his work is done. Carry us, the living, carry us forward into knowledge of the heart’s truth.”

  And I scooped dirt, held my hands over the grave, let the black earth trickle down onto the foot. I felt, then, a creepy intimation of surveillance. As if, from the shadows behind the trees, someone watched. How might this ceremony appear to a stranger? Certainly people bury things. Deceased pets, for instance. I packed loose soil and called out, “Hello?” But there was only stillness and a smell of ozone sweetly lofting in on a wind; and, from the west, the sound of thunder, its heavy echo rolling in from over the wetlands bordering town. Clouds eclipsed the moon and stars. I stuck a twig into the burial mound. It wasn’t much, only an obscure marker. Nevertheless I bent my head prayerfully over it and intoned these words: “Herein lies Jim Kunkel’s left foot, symbolizing leadership, fearlessness, creativity, and strength. Soon it will become dust. But the spirit of Jim shall rise up and walk into our homes and our hearts, it will guide us out of darkness.”