Four hours later he was lying stripped to his underwear in a motel bed. How he had gotten there he would have found difficult to reconstruct with any precision. She had asked him about his work; he had started into a discussion of the height of officers at the Battle of Bull Run; then she had nuzzled up against him and murmured, “Can’t we go somewhere we can be alone?”
“You mean like my office?” he replied. “Then I could give you a reprint of my article.”
“Actually I was hoping for someplace a little more intimate.”
A motel near the airport, it turned out, where she had already reserved a room. “Make yourself comfortable,” she’d said, then quickly stripped off his jacket, tie, shirt, pants, socks, and shoes, before disappearing into the bathroom. She was not, he had come to suspect, the newest member of the Physics department.
He looked around. On the walls of the room were northern landscapes, cheap reproductions of famous paintings by the Group of Seven. One scene reminded him of the view from the Campo de los Alces Motel, and it occurred to him that he had forgotten to tell the woman in blue about the Great White Moose. He started to hum “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” under his breath. Then he remembered the warning from Felicia Butterworth and shuddered into silence.
He turned his thoughts to the Civil War to ease his mind. On the taxi ride to the motel he had described to her in detail an article he was now preparing on the incidence of poisonous snake bites at Confederate military hospitals. “How fascinating!” she had sighed, and lifted his arm so she could bury her head into his chest. In an instant his apprehension about women had melted away.
“Perhaps she’d like to hear about the battles next,” he thought as he lay on his back, his hands behind his head. “I can start with Bull Run … No. No. The shelling of Fort Sumter. Edmund Ruffin. I can finish with the story of how, at the end of the war, Ruffin wrapped himself in the Confederate flag, placed a rifle in his mouth, and blew off his head. That will provide a pleasing symmetry.”
Just then the room went dark. He heard the door to the bathroom open. A spotlight came on, swathing the woman in blue in a shimmering pink light. Only she was no longer dressed in blue. She wore a studded black leather half-bra and thong panties, leather gauntlets, and a patent leather collar with glistening spikes. On her head was a Nazi storm trooper’s hat, on her legs storm trooper boots, on her hands storm trooper gloves. Her right hand gripped a whip.
Bewildered, Yale Templeton started to tell her about the boots worn by Union cavalrymen. “They were different from the ones you have on,” he observed. “For one thing …”
“Silence,” she shouted, and cracked the whip high over her head. He was so taken aback he decided not to risk telling her about the split he had noticed in her panties. “And in such an indiscreet place too,” he said to himself, reddening.
She moved slowly toward him, the spotlight tracking the undulations of her body. From somewhere in the room there began the rhythm of a pulsing, driving beat. “If only it were an Elizabethan madrigal,” he thought wistfully. She leaned over him, the studs on her bra denting his undershirt. “Give me your wrists,” she commanded. He dutifully extended his hands, and she drew them behind his head, pulling out a pair of handcuffs from under the pillow and locking him to the brass headboard. “Now,” she hissed with a sinister smile, “I’ll show you how to make some real history.” And placing one hand on his collar and the other on the elastic band of his boxer shorts, she ripped down hard, leaving him in a state of nature that would have made Thomas Hobbes squirm.
Certainly Yale Templeton squirmed as she flung the remnants of his underwear in a corner and started to remove her boots. “Lie still,” she ordered, then sitting on the bed and thrusting her foot toward his face: “Suck my toes.”
He gave her the look he used to get back at the Robinson-Fallis Academy when they placed the kippers in front of him at lunch on Wednesdays. “You dare to disobey me?” she cried. The whip cracked again, this time within centimetres of his nose. Momentarily he was left cross-eyed.
“Suck my toes!” she ordered again, her voice growing even louder and more insistent. He shook his head, though more fearfully than defiantly, and clamped his eyes and lips tightly shut. The whip cracked once more. He felt it graze a certain part of his anatomy where, according to his latest research, a mere 2 percent of rattlesnake bites had been recorded at Confederate military hospitals. Completely unnerved he pursed his lips. She slipped her baby toe inside. He held his breath as long as he could, then exhaled. The toe, he discovered, had a vaguely familiar taste. He touched it with the tip of his tongue, sucked on it gently. “You don’t happen to have any currant jelly?” he said at last, opening his eyes in hopeful expectation.
She did, as it happened. Not to mention bowls of strawberry, raspberry, and apricot jam, a jar of honey, a considerable quantity of hot fudge, several dollops of marshmallow sauce, a canister of Reddi-wip, and a litre-sized bottle of Mazola oil, all of which eventually found its way onto the bed, ceiling, walls, floor and, not incidentally, his body. There were bananas, of course, peeled and unpeeled. And a hand-held electrical device in the shape of some exotic organic squash he had puzzled over at the gourmet food shop in Rosedale.
During the course of the next half hour she made him aware of various procedures that, had they been performed by a doctor, would have been condemned by the College of Physicians and Surgeons as unconscionably invasive. He discovered parts of a woman’s body that he never knew existed. He discovered parts of his own body that he never knew existed. And then, just when she had succeeded in elevating him to heights rarely seen outside of certain back alleyways in Cuba before the revolution, the door to the room flew open and two men burst in, one carrying a camcorder, the other a Leica and flashbulb. They pirouetted around the room taking pictures as Yale Templeton watched in astonishment. Or rather attempted to watch, since all the while the woman no longer in blue—or in anything else, for that matter, besides her storm trooper cap and spiked collar—was exercising her extraordinary talent for manufacturing distractions. Until suddenly one of the men, the one with the camcorder, called out, “I think we’ve got enough.”
To which the woman no longer in blue replied, “No, not yet. There’s one other picture I’m supposed to get.” And she disappeared back into the bathroom, returning with a stovepipe hat, which she stuck on Yale Templeton’s head, a false beard, which she hung around his ears, and a fake mole, which she pasted onto his cheek. Then she ducked back into the bathroom only to reappear moments later in a short calico shift. She quickly tied clumps of her platinum blonde hair in pigtails with little ribbons, pulled out a bottle of shoe polish and smeared her face into charcoal blackness, then applied a wide slash of bright red lipstick to her mouth. When she had finished she called to the man with the camcorder, “All right, Milt. You can let ’er roll.”
Then she turned to Yale Templeton and, in an impeccably inflected dialect, sang, “Oh, Massa Linkum, you dun ’mancipate me. Howsoever I gwinna thank you?” And pulling her shift up over her head, she descended on him with all the savage passion of Pickett leading his famous charge up Cemetery Ridge.
At that moment, with the camcorder whirring and the flashbulbs exploding, Yale Templeton suddenly turned stone cold. All the lectures his mother had given him years before, they now flooded back in on him. All the alarming stories she told him of debauched women and wanton seduction, all the warnings about degradation and public humiliation. And he said to himself, with that depth of profound disillusionment that only the sudden dawning of long suppressed understanding can bring—he said to himself, as he floundered about in the chaotic historical perversion being played out on his body, with lipstick and shoe polish thrusting their way lewdly into the Mazola oil, currant jelly, and simulated whipped cream—he said to himself, “Mother was wrong. Sex is fun!”
And he struggled to say “Cheese.”
XVI
Her name was Bobbi Jo Jackson. “You know, like Pre
sident Andrew Jackson,” she pointed out. She had been born in the town of Sweet Dreams, in the Texas Panhandle. Her father was a Pentecostal preacher and coach of the high school football team. Unknown to her, he had also been a local operative for the CIA. It was unknown to the CIA as well, and the official in Washington responsible for domestic surveillance in the Southwest District wondered why letters crossed his desk every week from a Pentecostal preacher in Texas reporting on subversive activities by his neighbours. At first he regarded the letters with mild bemusement. But over the course of several years, as the communications became ever longer and more urgent—recording clandestine monthly visits from KGB spies and later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, subversive gatherings of Muslim terrorists, usually disguised as longhorn steer—he decided to send out a couple of agents to investigate.
What the agents discovered was the preacher’s daughter: just turned sixteen, captain of the high school cheerleading team, president of the youth wing of the local American Legion chapter, winner of the Miss Teenage Oil Derrick pageant, who sang in the choir at her father’s church and assisted in the Sunday school, who marched at the head of the July fourth parade in a red, white, and blue drum majorette uniform she had designed and sewed herself, who before classes every morning led the student body in prayers and the Pledge of Allegiance, and who bore a startling resemblance to Marilyn Monroe. “Only better looking,” as one of the agents noted in his report.
They brought her back to Washington and took her to the Agency recruitment department across the river in Virginia, where the official in charge took one look at her and immediately placed her in a course of training specially designed to make best use of her most conspicuous assets. She learned about martial arts and how to operate various deadly weapons, but most particularly about how to perform those extraordinary feats of coordination and agility that Yale Templeton had been privileged to witness. Initially she had been horrified at the thought of engaging in activities that seemed so completely to contradict the fundamental tenets of her religious upbringing. But as she had realized when she first started to menstruate, God works in mysterious ways. And it did not take her long to grasp that He could ask no higher demonstration of her devotion than that she lay down (and occasionally elevate) her body in the service of the man who now served as His surrogate on Earth, the President of the United States. And so she put aside the reservations she initially felt and threw herself into her training with the same kind of joyful enthusiasm that she brought to speaking in tongues. And by the time six months had passed, she had absorbed her lessons so well that each of the senior officials in the CIA insisted on meeting with her privately to pay personal tribute to her achievements.
When she was sent to work in the field, she rapidly established herself as one of the CIA’s most able operatives. Able, that is, if you define the term in a rather narrow way. She was never told the purpose of any mission, nor details about the man (or, on rare occasions, the woman) who had for one reason or another attracted the interest of the Agency. All she received from her superiors was an envelope containing a photograph of her intended target and information where he (or she) could be found. Nor did she ever ask any questions. It was enough to know that she was helping America fulfill its divinely ordained and indisputably Manifest Destiny.
She had been helping America fulfill its Manifest Destiny for almost five years when she received the envelope containing a picture of Yale Templeton. But all her training and experience had not prepared her for what happened next. Usually her victims—when they realized that they were her victims—would break down in tears and plead, perhaps even offer her a bribe. That or curse and hurl threats. Once in Ankara, a colonel in the security forces had broken free from the handcuffs, leaving her no choice but to slit his throat. On another occasion, in Bolivia, she had been pursued for days through the mountains by a guerrilla leader. Eventually she had stopped him with a bullet, although to the kneecap rather than head because, just as she cocked the trigger, she remembered the photograph he had shown her of two girls he claimed to be his daughters. But Yale Templeton did not plead, curse, or threaten. He simply addressed the man with the Leica politely: “You probably should take another shot. I think I blinked. It’s hereditary. My mother always blinks when I take her picture.”
And then, after the man with the Leica had obliged, and after he and the man with the camcorder had packed up their equipment and departed, Yale Templeton turned to Bobbi Jo Jackson and, smiling happily, started to tell her about Edmund Ruffin and Fort Sumter. She lay there listening, her elbow propped up on the pillow and her head resting on her hand. At first it was just out of curiosity. But as he rambled on (and on and on) she found herself swept up in an enthusiasm for the details of the Civil War—an enthusiasm, I might add, that in all his years of teaching he had never inspired in any student. And when he reached the Battle of Antietam—“or Sharpsburg, as it’s known in the South” he said, since he regarded it as an obligation to be comprehensive—she interrupted him to exclaim, “This is so cool!”
“And I’ve only just started,” he replied with delight. “The war goes on for three more years, until 1865.”
“Then let’s go get some coffee,” she said excitedly, yanking the ribbons from her hair and raising her astonishing body from the bed. “It looks like we’re going to be in for a long night!”
And now it was four a.m. They had been at the Tim Hortons donut shop for hours. Bobbi Jo Jackson was in blue once again, this time a pair of jeans and a navy blue sweatshirt with USA written across the front in large star-spangled letters. Yale Templeton was back in his suit and tie, although because of the gaping holes in his underwear he was starting to develop a rash. His narrative of the war had followed an entirely conventional course. Through Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg; through Corinth, Shiloh (“or Pittsburg Landing as it’s known in the South”), Vicksburg; by sea to New Orleans; around Chattanooga and up Missionary Ridge; down from the mountains into Atlanta and across Georgia to the sea; on horseback along the Shenandoah Valley; blindly into the Wilderness then on to Petersburg; and finally, inexorably, to Wilmer McLean’s farmhouse at Appomattox. He had told her about military strategy and conditions on the home front, about bread riots in Southern cities and industrial development in the North. And at the very last, he ended up where he had always known he would end up, with Edmund Ruffin sitting in his chair, wrapped in the Confederate flag, a rifle in his mouth. He did not, however, describe Ruffin’s ultimate act of defiance, out of respect for her obviously delicate feminine sensibilities.
“So we end up back with Edmund Ruffin, huh,” she observed. “That creates kind of a pleasing symmetry, doesn’t it?”
Yale Templeton beamed. He felt a sense of connectedness with another human being, something he had never truly, fully, experienced before. And he started to ramble on once again, but this time about his own history: about his mother and his childhood in Saffron Walden, about Cambridge and Caius College, about his years in Toronto and his disastrous trip to Chicago, about his passion for footnotes. And then, without stopping for even a moment to consider the possible consequences—indeed unmindful of anything at all beyond the stunningly beautiful woman who sat wide-eyed opposite him—he charged on into an account of his conversation with the chairman’s wife at the departmental reception, and his trips north in search of moose, and his meeting with Joseph Brant Lookalike, and the Great White Moose, and his encounter with Slinger the Trapper.
And then suddenly he started to choke, the warning from Felicia Butterworth wrapping itself like fingers around his throat. Alarmed, Bobbi Jo Jackson reached over and touched him gently on the wrist. That gesture, simple as it may have been, produced the kind of miraculous cure that she had regularly witnessed in her father’s little church. And now Yale Templeton charged off again, revealing all that he had been ordered never to reveal: about Lincoln, and the community in the wilderness, and the legal briefs, and even about the silence that Fe
licia Butterworth had imposed on him. And then he was done. There was nothing more to say. He sat there with his pulse racing, his face an expression of both great hope and boundless terror.
She stared at him for a long time. Hours, he might have claimed, if you had asked him about it later.
“So let me see if I’ve got this straight,” she said at last. “You’re telling me that President Abraham Lincoln faked his own death …”
“Yes.”
“… and then secretly came to Canada …”
He nodded.
“… to live as a transvestite?”
“That’s right.”
“And that the whole story is revealed in a set of legal briefs he wrote, which are hidden in a cave somewhere in Northern Ontario?”
He nodded again.
She gazed searchingly into his face, then dropped her eyes and stared into her coffee, shaking her head. Again it seemed to him like hours passed.
Finally she looked up. And speaking with a confessional earnestness that she usually reserved for her personal communications with Jesus, she pronounced, “Well, I think that’s important!”
“I think so too,” he agreed.
Then she stared down into her coffee again, thought a moment longer, and added, “And the fact that pig iron production went up 345 percent during the Civil War, that’s important, too.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Although in a different way,” she continued.
“Yes,” he acknowledged. “In a different way.”
And she stared down into her coffee again and bit her lip. She was attempting to reason now, something never previously required or expected of her. There was a slight ache in her right temple, and the muscles in her neck began to tighten. All the same she felt exhilaration: exhilaration of a kind that a historian without the gift of metaphor might say the Pilgrims felt when they first caught sight of Plymouth Rock.
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