“Is there any hope?” Mikoian asked.
Before Dr. Pietruszka could reply, Joe Steele groaned. He inhaled one more time. Then he simply-stopped. No one who saw him could doubt he was dead. To Charlie’s own horrified humiliation, he burst into tears.
XXVII
Charlie’s humiliation lasted no more than seconds. Then he noticed everyone in the room was sobbing with him. Betty Steele, of course, had every right to weep for her dead husband. But Dr. Pietruszka was crying, too. So were Stas Mikoian and Lazar Kagan, the one who’d boasted of being able to dance between drops of water and the other who seemed to have no feelings of any kind. And even Vince Scriabin’s rock of a face was a rock wet with tears. He took off his glasses so he could dab at his eyes with a handkerchief.
“What will I do?” Betty Steele wailed.
“What will the country do?” Mikoian asked. No one had an answer. For a day longer than twenty years, no one had had to wonder about the United States without Joe Steele at the helm.
A minute or so after that, a look of utter astonishment spread over Lazar Kagan’s broad face. He clapped a hand to his forehead. “My God!” he exclaimed, and then, as if that wasn’t enough, “Gottenyu!” A moment later, he explained why he was shocked enough to fall back into his childhood Yiddish: “Now look! That damned cowboy Garner is President of the United States!”
They stared at one another. For a day longer than twenty years, John Nance Garner had been the country’s spare tire. He’d lain in the trunk, in the dark, all that time. Now they had to bolt him into place and pray he hadn’t gone flat.
“How horrible,” Scriabin muttered. If Charlie hadn’t been only a few feet away from him, he wouldn’t have heard the words. Even if it creaked, the Constitution might need to start working again.
“We’d better call him.” By the way Mikoian said it, he would have been happier going to the dentist for a root canal without novocaine. But no one told him he was wrong. He called the Capitol. Wherever the Vice President was, he wasn’t presiding over the Senate. He called Garner’s Washington apartment-he had to look up the number, which showed how often he needed it. He spoke briefly, then put down the handset with a disgusted look. “He’s not there. It’s cleaning day, and I got the maid.”
A flashbulb went off inside Charlie’s head. “I know where he is!” he exclaimed. All the others in the room looked at him. Well, all but Joe Steele. Even dead, he seemed impossible to leave out of consideration. Charlie had to tear his gaze away from those set features before he could make himself walk out.
“Where are you going?” Kagan called after him.
“I’ll be back soon,” he threw over his shoulder, which both was and wasn’t an answer. Once he made it out of the room where Joe Steele had died, he moved faster. Even if he hadn’t, it would have made little difference. He wasn’t going far.
“Sullivan!” John Nance Garner said when he walked into the tavern near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “You’re early today, son.” He’d already been there a while. A couple of empty glasses, a full one, and a half-full ashtray sat in front of him on the bar.
“Sir. .” Charlie had to work to bring the words out, but he did: “Sir, you need to come back to the White House with me.”
“I need to do what?” In all the years they’d known each other, Garner had never heard anything like that from Charlie before. He started to laugh. Then he got a look at Charlie’s face. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” he whispered. He gulped the fresh drink, then got to his feet. “Let’s go. I’m. . as ready as I’ll ever be, I reckon.”
They walked to the White House side by side. Garner was, if anything, steadier on his pins than Charlie. He was used to bourbon; Charlie still felt the shock of Joe Steele’s death. As they walked, he told the Vice President-no, the President now: he still had to remind himself-what had happened. “So you’re it, Mr. President,” he finished.
“I never dreamt the day would come,” John Nance Garner said, partly to himself, partly to Charlie. “He’d just go on forever. Only he didn’t, did he?”
“No. I can’t believe it, either.” Charlie’s eyes still stung.
When they came up the walk, the guards at the entrance stiffened to attention. “Mr. President!” they chorused. Word was spreading, then.
In walked Garner. In walked President Garner, Charlie thought, trailing him. Yes, that would take some getting used to.
Kagan, Mikoian, and Scriabin waited just inside the doors. They also said “Mr. President!” as if with one voice.
Garner nodded to them. “Take me to Mrs. Steele, if you’d be so kind.”
“This way.” Kagan gestured. “She’s with-him.”
Betty Steele sat on the couch where her husband had died. There was room for her and for his body; he hadn’t been a big man. She started to stand when Garner came in. He waved her down again. “Ma’am, I am sorrier than I have words to tell you,” he said. “He was one of a kind, and that’s the truth.”
She gestured toward the corpse. “I can’t believe-I won’t believe-that’s all that’s left of him. The rest has to be in a better place.” She started to cry again.
“I hope you’re right,” Garner said. Charlie hoped so, too. Hoping and expecting were different beasts. The new President went on, “You don’t need to move out right away or anything. I can sleep in one of the guest bedrooms for a while. Take some time to get myself up to speed on what all needs doing, but I reckon I’ll manage.”
“We’ll do all we can to help you, sir,” Mikoian said.
“Oh, I just bet you will.” Garner’s eyes were gray and cold and hard. They might have been chipped from some ancient iceberg. He paused to light a cigarette. “First things first. We got to let folks know what’s happened, and we got to arrange a funeral that says good-bye the right way.”
No one said no. He hadn’t known he was President for half an hour yet, but he already saw it took a lot to make anyone say no to the man with the most powerful job in the world.
* * *
Casper, Wyoming, had twenty or twenty-five thousand people in it. It sat, about a mile up, on the south bank of the North Platte River. To the south rose pine-covered mountains that reminded Mike too much of the ones where he’d learned the lumberjack’s trade. When he said so at a coffee shop or diner, he often got knowing chuckles; quite a few middle-aged men there were wreckers who had few choices about where they lived.
To him, it was. . a place. To Midori, it was a spark of light in an ocean of darkness. The wide-open spaces of the American West awed her till they scared her. She didn’t like to go out of town. Just a few miles, and any sign that humans inhabited the planet disappeared. Japan had next to no places like that. Too many people, not enough land. . That was what the fight between Japan and America sprang from, right there. Here in Wyoming, it was the other way around-too much land, with not enough people to fill it.
Mike worked with John Dennison some of the time. He wasn’t a great carpenter, but he could do most of what he needed to do. All those years in the encampment and in the Army had skilled his hands into learning things in a hurry. He did a little woodcutting to bring in extra cash.
And he bought an old typewriter and banged out a few stories. He submitted them under a pen-name. The first one came back with a note scrawled on the form rejection. Too hot for us, it said. You can write, but you’ve got to tone it down if you want to sell.
He swore. He wanted people to know what it was like to survive as an ex-wrecker in Joe Steele’s America, dammit. But editors didn’t want to wind up in encampments. After a while, he realized he could write stories that had nothing to do with barracks and thin stew and punishment brigades, but that his attitude toward those things would come through anyway.