by Carson, Tom
Among other things, we could get hot dogs, hot-dog buns, and ground beef for burgers. Hamburger buns were the missing Grail. The Finns’ cook thought he’d solved that one year by rolling beef patties in the shape of hot dogs, but even the kids on the post couldn’t eat them. They looked too much like turds.
That was when I decided nothing was really more American than Southern-style fried chicken. Not only could we get the birds, which weren’t plump but were edible. For a reason neither we nor the Nagonese ever, ever alluded to—not even in front of the seventeenth-century Portuguese fort at Ouibomey, and definitely not on the Fourth of July—our cooks took to the spicings as if they’d, um, invented them.
Dear God, you children can be slow. What do you think those enterprising Portuguese had been exporting, anyhow? Whose blood do you think legend claimed still ran wet one night a year on the walls of the Ouibomey fort’s dungeon? Did you even wonder what that line in “Le soleil d’aujourd’hui” about “centuries of suffering without respite” alluded to? At the time, U.S. visa and immigration policy gave considerable preference to applicants with blood relatives who were American citizens. Every Nagonese who applied had thousands of them. They just had no way of knowing, much less proving, who any of them were.
The kids on the post moped at being deprived of guns outright, so I compromised by confining them to the Revolutionary War. Hadn’t I seen a Sears-consignment toy musket in Sean-pronounced-Seen’s arsenal? He looked exasperated: “It’s a Civil War musket, not a Continental smoothbore. And they take so darn long to reload!”
Some tyke, that Sean. No wonder Nan and Ned looked woebegone every time they remembered him. He only decided the musket and the now moldy tricorn hat Hopsie’d worn as John Paul Jones would do once Laurel and Carol aroused his jealousy by outfitting the Warren lads and the younger Sawyer boy as the Spirit of ’76.
Carol sewed a blue panel with a colonial circlet of thirteen stars over the fifty-state version on one of the Embassy flags. The Presidential band wouldn’t part with its snare drum, so Laurel improvised with a tribal tom-tom from Ouibomey and two wooden kitchen spoons. The flute was from Ouibomey too, but a flute is a flute is a flute.
Nell Finn was glumly contemplating life as Betsy Ross again. Unlike Carol, she couldn’t sew any more than Nan could, which had made the whole act a bit Marcel Marceau at our last Fourth of July. She brightened up when I suggested Pocahontas and lent her a copy of Glory Be bookmarked at “A Princess.” Instantly, Tommie Sawyer decided he’d be an Injun brave, but don’t misread puppy love there. By some peculiar boyish measure, he now outranked them all—Pocahontas had no tomahawk.
Bunting on the Residence, bunting on the Embassy. Paper red-white-and-blue bouquets topping each corner of our compound’s walls. On the Residence’s tin roof, portraits of JFK and wife and M’Lawa and wife flanked the banner bearing Pam’s favorite motto and her cheerful translation: “the declaration of independence makes a difference/la déclaration d’indépendance, sans blague (Herman Melville, romancier Américain, 1819–1891).”
Sousa, Victory at Sea, and “Seventy-Six Trombones” playing on speakers. Aromas of hot dogs and sizzling fried chicken, so strong in the heat they almost knocked out Plon-Plon-Ville’s two olfactory constants: motorbike fumes and cowflop. In Bermuda shorts, Faddle was stocking our biggest cooler with Coca-Cola, a rare treat even the kids on the post understood must be saved for the sacred day. They usually made do with the local French product. In the Embassy’s garage, we’d set up our movie screen and 16mm projector to show the creaky Hollywoodisms we could rent without busting our budget: Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig in Pride of the Yankees, Ronald Reagan as George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American. I’d decided a sports theme was both Yankee Doodley and benign.
When I stopped by to get the name of his projectionist, Ehud Tabor laughed helplessly. I didn’t really expect anyone to play close attention to the movies, though. They were just there to forestall people thinking there was nothing to do, the eternal crisis of the Plon-Plon-Ville diplomatic corps.
The drill was that our American gang was on hand by midmorning. Then the diplomatic corps showed up, followed by the Nagonese Cabinet. The vital thing was that M’Lawa—and in our final year, N’Koda, who continued the tradition—had to arrive with the full crowd on hand, and heaven help the luckless Nagonese official who dawdled in after him. As for us, our main worry was that Ned Finn might be not only well oiled but leaking lubricant by the time the Président arrived. Luckily, he too remembered the nearly disastrous timing of his Nagonized version of West Side Story last year—“M’Lawa! Say it soft and it’s almost like freedom/Say it loud and you’ll weep as you read ’em”—and was sticking to beer.
He wasn’t bad with the new Soviet Ambassador, either. Vasily Shishkov having left us for Buenos Aires, his replacement was a fellow named Goliadkin we all thought was a charlatan. The Central Casting types often have that effect, precisely because you meet them so rarely.
“I’m glad to see at least a few of your indigenes survived,” Goliadkin said heartily as Nell trotted by in her Pocahontas feather, rolling a Sears-consignment hula hoop. Nobody’d told her what they were for. “What tribe is the little girl from?”
“She’s a Kulak,” said Ned offhandedly. “Unless you’d like something harder, Mr. Ambassador, would you care for a Coke?”
“I’ve counted coup!” Tommie Sawyer bopped Nell with his tomahawk. “Now I’ve got to scalp you. That’s the rule. C’est la règle, Nell, tu le sais.”
“Tommie, ouch!” Nell said firmly as he tried to wrestle her to the ground. “Et de quoi parles-tu, hein? We don’t scalp girls in our tribe.”
“Oh, ta gueule. C’mon, please? I’ll let you be the first to give la lèpre money outside Monoprix next time. Nobody else has hair long enough to get scalped.”
“Oh, go scalp your mom. Fous-moi la paix, Tommie! I’m Pocahontas. Now give me back my hoop.”
“I can’t scalp my own mother,” said Tommie disgustedly. Sometimes, I think Buzz and Carol’s bid to get him recognized as a quasi-Kennedy wasn’t so far-fetched.
“Monsieur le ministre!” I called. “So good of you to come. How goes l’Éducation, la Culture et le Tourisme?”
Of course he wanted to reminisce about Ethel’s visit to Ouibomey, our increasingly tattered social habit ever since. “Naturally, we dream of her,” he said with a reverent nod up at Jackie’s photograph on the roof. “Elle parle Français, vous savez?”
“Bien sûr.”
Then that beetle-browed shy academic—he’d written his dissertation on Alfred Jarry’s African influences—surprised me. His eyes grew furtive, his voice intense. I was no longer engaged in social diplomacy, but the political kind.
“Mrs. Cadwaller, please pass this on to Washington. If I could host Jacqueline Kennedy here for even one day”—a no longer academic finger went up—“a coup of that magnitude might make me the most popular man in the country. I share the New Frontier’s ideals. I—”
Philippe Paul-Christophe P’kapa was interrupted by the opening notes of “Le soleil d’aujourd’hui.” In Nagon, it only played on one car’s horn, as if the blatting of a cat’s cradle of motorcyclists wasn’t enough of a giveaway.
“Monsieur le ministre, please excuse me. I must greet le Président.”
“As must we all. Sooner or later,” the Minister of Education, Culture, and Tourism said resignedly as M’Lawa, massive in a boxy electric-blue suit, exited his Presidential convertible. Its buttery Catskills honeymoon bathtub of rich leather upholstery made it the only car grander than our Checker limo in all of Nagon.
Whatever that Polytechnique-trained economist turned dictator was, stupid he wasn’t. As he entered our compound beside tribally shawled Madame M’Lawa—Celeste favored Pierre Cardin on most days, but this was her official regalia—his eyes needed only one sweep of the sc
ene once they’d rested on his own portrait atop the Residence roof to spot the dominant fact at our Fourth of July reception and cookout.
“Où est le général N’Koda?” Where is General N’Koda?
“I’m the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” Gary Cooper’s voice maundered from the garage. Then we heard gunfire.
Posted by: Pam
Cadwaller stepped forward. “Monsieur le Président, I have no way of knowing what’s going on. None,” he emphasized as M’Lawa stared, because our reputation did precede us. “Until we learn more, I must strongly advise you to return to the Palais du Président immediately. We have no local communications here.”
M’Lawa hesitated. Too many thoughts were gnashing gears behind that hefty forehead, and he had no way of telling which were significant. The mind of a dictator has to make room to not only brew his own schemes, but monitor the hypothetical ones of a dozen or a hundred other men—including, just now, Hopsie’s own.
“I strongly advise it,” Cadwaller repeated. “You have only your bodyguards with you. Think, Monsieur le Président. The Presidential Guard is at the Palais, not here. They’re your best hope to retrieve this situation, whatever it is.”
From far off in that muggy still air came a grenade’s sharp but humidity-muffled crack. Later we realized it must’ve been the attack on the radio station going in. Audibly nearer us and coming closer every second, we heard grinding engines and shouts, along with more rifle shots—more likely exuberant than hostile, as they had no opposition up that way—from the north end of Boul’ Mich. In case my daisysdaughter.com readers have forgotten, that was where the Army’s barracks were, across from the sports palace.
“Monsieur le Président, you don’t have much time,” said Ned Finn briskly, flicking away a Marlboro as he returned from a quick inspection of the street. “I don’t think they’ve blocked the road to the Palais just yet. But their advantage right now is that they know exactly where you are.”
That clinched it. Though his eyes said he hadn’t worked everything out—one gear was still sticking—M’Lawa nodded. “Voiture!” he commanded his nearest bodyguard. “Celeste!” he called to his wife, who at the first shots had started for the Residence porch as if guided by her own portrait glowing on its hot tin roof. “On y va.”
Without waiting to see if she was obeying—he could always get another wife, but had only one Palais du Président—he turned and let his bodyguards muscle him out of the Embassy compound. They were only muscling humid air, but habit is habit, and Celeste M’Lawa said “Oh, et puis zut” and scooted to join them. As more gunfire erupted, she found time to grab my elbow with a startlingly mischievous smile.
“Mon Dieu, how I’ve longed for this day,” she confided. “This damned kerchief! You will visit us on the Riviera, won’t you? Le soleil d’hier m’est beaucoup plus agréable.” After a quick one-two Parisienne cheek peck, then she was gone too.
“Christ, Ned!” said Hopsie with uncommon relief once we’d closed the gates behind them. “That was close.”
“Damn close,” Ned agreed. “You see Celeste head for the Residence? She knew.”
“What was going on?” That was Bermuda-shorted Faddle, clutching a half eaten hot dog.
“Hon, he was on U.S. territory,” Ned explained with a grin of reprieve. “If he’d thought fast enough to ask us for asylum, Jesus! By the time we got an answer from Washington—”
“He’d have been singing ‘Edelweiss’ in my shower,” said Cadwaller. “And then what if they’d tried to take him by force? N’Koda’s too smart for that, but a mob is a mob.”
Were we ever in for a shock. “Let them come!” mad little Sean Finn shrieked, gripping his toy musket. “‘If they mean to have a war’—”
“‘Let it begin here!’” whooped Tommie Sawyer in his fierce Iroquois war paint.
“Oh good God,” Hopsie said as the full lunacy of the kids on the post sank in. “Pam, round up all the kids and get them the hell inside the Embassy. No, the Residence. I don’t think there’ll be much shooting, but they don’t know it’s real.”
Sean burst into tears. “Yes, we do. Yes, we do.”
“Nan, Laurel, Carol!” I called. “I’m going to need help.”
Cadwaller meanwhile had bounded up to the porch, where the microphone set up for the official exchange of Independence Day greetings stood under Melville’s banner. “I must ask the Nagonese Cabinet to leave,” he announced. “We cannot offer you any protection. Buzz! Handle that. Members of the diplomatic corps are naturally free to stay here or return to their own Embassies as they wish.”
“Are you joking, Ambassador?” Ehud Tabor called out merrily. “These are the best seats in the house.”
“Yes, and there’s a great deal of beer,” Klaus Schlitten chimed in.
“Goliadkin,” said Hopsie, away from the microphone and back down the porch steps. “Your call, of course, but I think it might be best if you did stick around. We don’t know what’s happening in Ouibomey—unless, of course, you know what’s happening here,” he added, now wry.
“It wasn’t us either,” said the Soviet Ambassador. “Cadwaller, it really wasn’t you?”
“Nope,” Hopsie said. “And my word on that too. Tell your government. Goliadkin, you don’t think the Chinese—?”
Goliadkin laughed. “How would we know? How would anyone?”
The grinding engines, exuberant shots, and chants from the far end of Boul’ Mich were getting steadily more thunderous. As Buzz Sawyer shepherded the soon-to-be-former Nagonese Cabinet toward our compound’s rear exit, Rich Warren mounted a ladder to take down M’Lawa’s and Madame M’Lawa’s portraits. He took down JFK’s and Jackie’s too, puzzling me until I saw his inspired idea of hooking them to the compound’s front gate.
As for me, I was rounding up children. Two Warrens, two Sawyers, Sean-pronounced-Seen—oh, my God.
“Tommie!” I shouted. “Have you seen Nell Finn?”
His lip curled. “The squaw?”
Finally—and I must admit satisfyingly—I lost my temper with the Sawyers’ little princeling. “Listen, you brat! Do you want to have a fight with me? C’est ça que tu veux?”
May I remind you that he was in second grade and I was five foot ten? Is this the right time to mention that after the kids on the post saw a French-dubbed version of One Hundred and One Dalmatians at the Bijou Castafiore, I’d caught more than one of them looking at me as if eccentric, literally lofty Mrs. Cadwaller was a certain someone’s Plon-Plon-Ville avatar?
“Pam!” Carol Sawyer exploded. “I’m sorry, but you can’t yell at my son. If there’s yelling to do, I’ll do it, all right? Nan’s got her hands full with Sean and no wonder. Can you please find Nell on your own?”
I stared around. Rich had killed John Philip Sousa, but our houseboys were still surreally bringing our remaining guests drinks. The oncoming engines and glad cries and rifle shots were vying with exhilarated diplomats’ laughter and banter. Then with new woe I recalled what I’d seen rolling out our compound’s front gate just after M’Lawa and Celeste bustled through it.
Unsure how close the rebels were by now, I knew I didn’t want to unbar and reopen the gate. Blessing myself for choosing a pantsuit and sandals that morning, I forked left gam and then right over the compound’s low wall and saw Nell immediately. Under her Pocahontas feather and clutching her hula hoop, she was staring transfixed up Boul’ Mich.
What she was staring at was pretty transfixing even if you’d seen Paris liberated. Like the four clanking behind it, the lead snowplow was packed with perspiration-oiled soldiers hanging off every stanchion, rifles raised and mixing cheers with lusty renderings of “Le soleil d’aujourd’hui.” Crowning them in the thick shimmer of heat were big portraits of N’Koda and Nagonese flags. No red ones, I noted swiftly, alleviating Cadwall
er’s most urgent concern.
Trotting alongside and behind were the reserve N’Koda had smuggled in from upcountry: a few hundred of his tribal kinfolk from the north. Gaunt-armed and bony-shouldered in the sleeveless ribbed cotton undershirts that were pretty much the mission civilisatrice’s only notable contribution to noncoastal Nagon, they were armed with upcountry’s traditional hunting weapons: machetes and iron bows with cloth grips and slung quivers of grim iron arrows. Quite a few of them were wearing one of Buzz Sawyer’s eight thousand screwdrivers as a festive pendant on a lanyard around their necks: “Smart man, N’Koda,” Cadwaller said later. “Even-steven.”
“Nell, what on earth,” I stammered at the top of my lungs. Realized I’d better walk and not dash to her: someone running might look like a target. Her pinched grave face looked up.
“If this be my fate, I must submit,” she said calmly—a line adapted from, so help me, the Pocahontas chapter of Glory Be. Some distant part of me felt flattered.
Frenzy came first. “For God’s sake!” I screeched. “What is with you damn children?”
“Oh, that’s simple!” she said, clearly pleased and surprised to be asked. “We don’t know what’s expected of us. Richie Warren thinks that if we guess right we’ll all get to go home to the States, but he makes a lot of stuff up. We all do.” Then she turned to face the rumbling snowplows.
Right, right! The snowplows. I’d grown moderately used to jiggling the infant Tim Cadwaller on our Paris visits to Chris and Renée. I’m pretty sure I’d never tried to hoist a nine-year-old.
“My hoop!” she implored as I staggered while lifting her, that stupid feather going right up my left nostril. So I had to bend back down to grab that too. Then I ran and dumped Nell on the far side of the compound wall before scrambling over myself. Lost a sandal and my pantsuit tore on a snag.