Lincoln's Briefs
Page 1
Copyright © 2018 Michael Wayne
Published as electronic edition by Iguana Books
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Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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First published in print in 2009 by Kellom Books, an imprint of Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc.
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Toronto, Ontario
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise (except brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of the author or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Some quotations in the book are cited from The Moose Book by Samuel Merrill,1916; Richard Hayklut, Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America, 1582; Richard Hayklut, The Principal Navigations, 1589; and Humbert Wolfe, ‘The Grey Squirrel’ from Kensington Gardens, 1924. All other works cited are fictitious.
Cover portraits and interior illustrations by Phil Richards.
Map by The Cartography Office, Department of Geography, University of Toronto.
ISBN 978-1-77180-289-5 (EPUB)
ISBN 978-1-77180-290-1 (Kindle)
This is an original electronic edition of Lincoln’s Briefs.
For Sandra
Joel was in love.
I
Joel was in love. It all went back to the introductory lecture for History 393, when he first saw Cheryl. Peroxide blonde (his favourite shade), perfect body, nails painted aquamarine to match her eyes. The sight of her had reduced him to whimpers. But when Professor Templeton handed out the syllabus and she saw the reading load, Cheryl was appalled. “Twenty pages a week! Can you believe it? What am I supposed to do? Become a monk?” And so she had dropped the course.
But then he had noticed Samantha. Dangly earrings, ruby lipstick, tattoo of a kitten peering over the top of her jeans from her perpetually exposed midriff. Even now the memory of the tattoo made his knees weak. But by the second week of class she was complaining about the lectures: “How can anyone make a course on the Civil War so boring!” And by the third week she had disappeared, too.
Not that it had come as a surprise to Joel that the course was boring. He had read the comments on RateMyProfessor.com: “Dry as dust.” “Recommended for anyone with insomnia.” “Professor Templeton should have given up lecturing when he died.” It sounded exactly like the sort of course he was looking for. Peaceful. Unchallenging. No distractions. Of course, not many women were likely to be enrolled in a course on the American Civil War. But Joel needed just one more credit to graduate; his parents had threatened to cut off his allowance; and Professor Templeton hadn’t failed anyone in almost twenty years of teaching. All in all, an ideal environment for the pursuit of love.
After Samantha had been Eleanor. Then Danielle. (Or was it Deirdre? He had trouble with names.) Then Jennifer. One by one they had all stopped attending class. And now there was Mona. Ah, Mona! He loved her with a breadth and depth of passion he had never imagined. She was the fulfillment of all his dreams. Well, would have been if not for her teeth, nose, complexion, and thighs. But at least she was a woman; he was pretty sure about that. And the only one left in the course, as it turned out.
In fact, by the last weeks of the term just five students were regularly showing up for class. Vince Gionfriddo, defensive tackle on the football team, always occupied a seat in the back of the hall. He was on academic probation and had been ordered by the athletic director to attend all his lectures. Which he did. And slept. In the first row, seated side by side directly in front of the lectern, were Baruch Goldbloom and Douglas Wong. They spent each class writing furiously, taking down everything Professor Templeton said. At home in the evening they would check their notes against recordings they’d made of the lecture, then type them up and run them off in duplicate, exchanging copies the following day.
Joel never wrote a thing. He just sat next to Mona, staring dreamily at her profile. Occasionally he would emit a sigh. Mona never turned toward him; she just looked ahead, smiling contentedly. Now and then she would write down a word or phrase that caught her imagination: “Shylow.” “Aunt Teetum.” She would use a swirling script, add little curlicues, and surround the words with flowers. Other times she would write letters to friends or jot down little reminders to herself: “Get cat food.” “Party at the KAP house Friday.”
Professor Templeton was oblivious to it all. He never heard Vince Gionfriddo’s snoring, never noticed Joel gazing dreamily. He could not even have told you how many students were showing up for class. It could have been five, it could have been fifteen. He spent each lecture eyes fixed on his notes, reading in a monotonous drone. Not that he was bored himself. He loved the history of the Civil War. Every year he tracked down new bits of information and painstakingly added them to his lectures. He was fascinated by detail: the quantity of salt consumed in the Confederacy, the diameter of cannonballs used in naval battles, the number of cases of gangrene reported at Union military hospitals during the Wilderness campaign. Each class was an opportunity to wrap himself in the security of facts and escape for an hour into a time when outcomes seemed much more certain than they did at present.
On this particular day in March Professor Templeton was lecturing about the effect of the war on industrial development in the North. Meanwhile Joel was wondering whether he should talk to Mona. He had been sitting next to her for three weeks now, but they had never exchanged a word. Love was so much simpler that way, confined to the imagination. Still, there were only nine more lectures left in the course, he had no plans or prospects beyond this term, and he longed for someone to help him find himself.
And then his attention was momentarily distracted. Professor Templeton had uncharacteristically injected a note of urgency into his words. “Now this is important,” he was saying. “Be sure to write it down.” (Mona had dutifully written “important” in her notebook, dotting the i with a happy face.) “Pig iron production in the North increased 345 percent during the war.” (Mona added a body and corkscrew tail to the happy face and turned it into a little pig.) Joel yawned. And then, as his consciousness was drifting back to concerns of a more personal nature, he heard Professor Templeton say—he thought he heard Professor Templeton say—“Before he was supposedly assassinated, Abraham Lincoln spoke very optimistically about the promise of industrial development after the war.”
Joel started. “Supposedly assassinated?” He looked around. Vince Gionfriddo was still fast asleep at the back of the class. In the front row Baruch Goldbloom and Douglas Wong had their heads down and were writing furiously. Next to him Mona had drawn a tiny stovepipe hat on the pig. He couldn’t help himself. “Sir,” he blurted out. But Professor Templeton was now completely absorbed in an analysis of coal production in Pennsylvania. “Sir,” Joel called out again, and then finally—this time shouting—“Excuse me. Professor Templeton!”
Professor Templeton looked up, startled. He didn’t recognize the young man standing in the middle of the lecture hall. “It must be a student,” he thought. “I wonder why he’s yelling at me? Probably on drugs. I hope he isn’t going to take his clothes off.” Two or three years earlier a naked woman had burst into a lecture he was giving on Chickamauga, carrying a placard protesting cruelty to animals. She thought it was a lab on vivisection.
“That last point,” said Joel. “Could you repeat it?”
Professor Templeton relaxed. “Most certainly,” he replied, pleased to find a student who evidently shared his devotion to arcane statis
tics. “Pig iron production in the North increased 345 percent during the war.”
“No, not that. What you said about Lincoln?”
“Lincoln?”
“His assassination.”
Professor Templeton looked confused.
“I thought … I mean … It sounded like you were suggesting he wasn’t assassinated.”
“Oh,” Professor Templeton said. “Yes, that’s true. He was not assassinated.”
“He wasn’t?”
“No. He faked his own death.”
“He did?!”
“He had to. Otherwise he never would have been able to take on a new identity and move to Canada.”
Joel burst into laughter.
Professor Templeton looked wounded. “The evidence is quite compelling.”
“He’s serious!” Joel thought.
“He settled up near Lake Superior.”
“But why in the world would Lincoln come to Canada?”
“Ah, yes. Well, that is the part that may be a little hard to believe. It seems from the time he was a teenager Lincoln had dreamed of living openly as a cross-dresser. He knew his preferred lifestyle would never be acceptable to the vast majority of Americans with their Puritan values. Canada was a logical choice because, as you know, here transvestites have not only been tolerated but regarded as a vital piece of the cultural mosaic.”
Joel opened his mouth to respond, but no words came out. Next to him Mona had drawn a dress on the pig. In the back of the class Vince Gionfriddo was snoring blissfully, while in the first row Baruch Goldbloom and Douglas Wong continued to write furiously.
Professor Templeton glanced at his watch. “Ah, will you look at that,” he said. “I won’t be able to complete my discussion of Northern coal production today. I guess I’ll have to take it up at the beginning of the next lecture.” Then he packed up his notes and was out the door.
Joel shook his head in disbelief. “Did you hear that?” he exclaimed, turning to Mona.
“Yes, it’s interesting, isn’t it?” she replied agreeably, giving her head a coy tilt.
“Interesting!?” Joel cried. “It’s insane!”
“Oh, do you really think so?” she said, pouting. And then she brushed the hair back from her face and gave him a beguiling smile. (Well, as beguiling a smile as she could manage considering her bridgework.)
But Joel wasn’t thinking about Mona or her smile. He was thinking about what had just happened. He was thinking about what had just happened and wondering how much the National Enquirer paid for its stories.
II
The President led the three men down a hall in the White House. He stopped outside a broom closet, then after looking around to make sure no one was watching, opened the door and hustled them all inside.
There was no light in the closet, and the men had to crush together. The Director of the CIA began to sweat profusely. Three years of hypnotherapy had not eliminated his fear of confined spaces, and the Xanax never seemed to work as well as he expected.
The Director of the FBI spoke first. “I think I’m standing in a bucket of water,” he snickered.
The President sighed. “Try not to splash around too much this time, Raymond. We have a critically important matter to discuss.”
“In here?!” croaked the Director of the CIA, his voice a rising falsetto.
“No, not in here, Clyde. I just need to find the—”
“Mr. President …” The Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs discreetly cleared his throat. “Uh … I believe you … uh … what I mean is, sir … your hand …” And he cleared his throat again.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Lloyd. I thought that was the concealed knob I’m looking for. If you can just edge over a bit.” He felt along the wall. “Ah, yes, there it is.” And the back of the closet swung around to reveal a hidden room.
The President stepped inside right ahead of the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and the Director of the FBI, his left foot dragging the bucket. The Director of the CIA followed after them, falling face first in a dead faint. “Bring him to, Raymond,” the President ordered the Director of the FBI. “There must be a little water left in there.”
Photographs of the President from the time he was a baby lined the walls. In each he was smiling broadly. Otherwise the room was empty, except for an American flag blowing gently in a breeze produced by a ceiling fan. To the right stood a door.
“Gentlemen,” the President began gravely, “No other person knows about this room. I added it precisely for an occasion like this when …”
“You built it yourself?” interrupted the Director of the FBI, impressed.
The President paused for a moment. “Ah, no. I see your point. No, I didn’t actually build it myself. What I should have said was: No other person knows about this room besides the six workmen who constructed it.” He paused and thought some more. “And the contractor who arranged for them.” He paused a third time. “Oh yes, and the plumber. I had to bring the plumber in when the toilet backed up.” And he indicated the door to the right.
“But aside from those eight other men, no one else knows about this room. I had it built precisely for an occasion like this, when a grave crisis threatens the nation and I have to be sure I can meet with my chief security officers in absolute secrecy.”
Just at that moment they heard the sound of a toilet flushing, and into the room from the door on the right walked the Executive Assistant to the Assistant Undersecretary of Transportation. “Grave crisis? What grave crisis?” he asked, wiping his hands on his pants. “Oh, by the way, you’re out of paper towels in there, and someone better call a plumber. The toilet’s overflowed.”
The Director of the CIA grabbed him by the collar, whipped out a Beretta, and held it to his head. “Should I kill him now, Mr. President?”
“No, no, Clyde, that won’t be necessary. Lowell has been with me for more than twenty years, since I first ran for the state legislature. He has always been completely devoted to my interests and has committed a long list of indictable offenses on my behalf. It will be enough to take his children hostage.”
“And my wife too, sir. You can’t afford to take chances.”
“Fine,” said the President. “Raymond can look after it. But now let’s get down to business.”
He took a copy of the National Enquirer out of his jacket pocket. “This issue will hit the newsstands day after tomorrow,” he said, holding it up so the other men could see the front page. “I don’t have to tell you what a danger it poses for the country.”
“Oprah Loses 40 Pounds in Three Weeks on All-Banana Diet,” read the Director of the FBI. “That’s astonishing!”
“No, not that. This.” And the President pointed to the headline running across the top of the page: “Professor Claims Lincoln Faked Death and Moved to Canada to Live as Transvestite.”
The directors of the CIA and FBI and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs all gasped. The Executive Assistant to the Assistant Undersecretary of Transportation looked from one face to another and back again. “What’s the matter?” he said. “It’s not like it’s true.”
“Of course it’s true,” exploded the President.
“Lincoln, a transvestite!?” exclaimed the Executive Assistant to the Assistant Undersecretary of Transportation.
“Half the presidents have been transvestites,” the President thundered. “Coolidge was a woman, for Chrissakes!”
The directors of the FBI and CIA and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs all nodded knowingly.
The Executive Assistant to the Assistant Undersecretary of Transportation put his head in his hands. “I can’t believe it!”
“But did Lincoln really fake his own death and move to Canada?” asked the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.
“Ah, well, that part I’m not so sure about,” admitted the President. “I’d heard rumours about the
assassination. But Canada? I don’t know …” He thought for a moment. “Of course, it makes sense. If you wanted to live openly as a transvestite, where better than Canada? It’s a den of iniquity up there. Not that I think we should be too hard on the Canadians. After all, they haven’t been blessed with our historic advantages. I mean, think of the legacy left us by the Pilgrims.”
“Religious fanaticism?” replied the Director of the CIA.
“Smug self-righteousness?” replied the Director of the FBI.
“No! no!” shouted the President. “Decent, God-fearing family values!”
“Ah, yes,” the three security officers chorused, “Decent, God-fearing family values!”
“The American people are the finest, most moral, most virtuous people who ever graced the face of the Earth,” the President intoned solemnly, dabbing his eyes. “You can’t expect them to understand what elevation to the White House does to a man. How it affects him knowing that with one word he can wipe out half the planet.” His voice quavered. “They have no idea of the visions that haunt him. Blood-red gashes and smouldering heat. Convulsive bodies, exploding missiles, spewing fluids.” His face flushed and sweat began to form on his upper lip. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. “The torment is unbelievable. Who can blame a president for wanting to slip into a filmy negligee or put on lipstick and mascara?”
He stood silent for a moment, staring at a picture of himself as a grinning six-year-old boy wearing a coonskin cap and waving a cap gun as he sat proudly on a pony at Disneyland. He sighed. “American innocence is sacrosanct. We must preserve it at all costs.”
“Yes, yes,” chimed the directors of the FBI and the CIA and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.
“So what do we do?” asked the Executive Assistant to the Assistant Undersecretary of Transportation.
“We make sure this story goes no further,” replied the President grimly, and he waved the copy of the National Enquirer in the air.
“But how?”
“Well,” said the President, “we better start with the professor who broke the story. Yale Templeton is his name. He teaches in Toronto.”