So he wrote stories about Greenwich Village in the Thirties. He wrote stories about breakups where the abandoned party couldn’t help what happened and was left feeling sideswiped by life’s unfairness. He sold a couple of them, not to top markets and not for top money, but he sold. Little checks helped, too. So did the chance to drain bitterness from his spirit, even if he had to do it less directly than he cared to.
And then Joe Steele died. Mike and John found out about it when they knocked off for lunch and walked from John’s shop to the diner down the street. (John was back in the place he’d used before he became WY232. The fellow who’d denounced him had been denounced in turn, and had died in an encampment. “Who says there’s no such thing as justice?” John would ask-but only with the handful of people he trusted.)
Snow crunched under Mike’s Army boots. Casper’s climate was less rugged than the labor encampment’s had been. Casper was both lower and farther south. But the first week of March here belonged to winter, not spring.
The waitress who brought their menus was about their age. John Dennison had known her since they were kids. She got her blond hair out of a bottle these days. She was brassy and usually unflappable. Today, mascara-filled tears drew streaks down her face.
“Good Lord, Lucy!” John exclaimed. “Tell me who did it to you, and the son of a gun is dead.” By the way he said it, he meant it.
But Lucy answered, “He is dead,” and started crying some more.
“Who’s dead?” John and Mike asked together.
“You haven’t heard?” She stared at them, her eyes wide and red. “The President is! Joe Steele!” She wept harder than ever.
Mike started to let out a war whoop of pure joy. He started to, but he didn’t. The counterman was sniffling, too. So were almost all the customers. Mike knew one guy sitting at the counter was an old scalp. He kept dabbing at his eyes with a Kleenex, too.
Even John Dennison looked stunned. And he’d gone into the encampments for what he said about Joe Steele, the same way Mike had.
“What are we gonna do?” Lucy asked, possibly of God. “He’s been running things so long! How’ll we get along without him?” She blew her nose, then grabbed her order pad. “What d’you guys wanna eat?”
They told her. She went away. “I don’t believe it,” John said, shaking his head in wonder. “After all these years, I just don’t believe it.”
“Let’s see if we get some freedom back now,” Mike said.
“You don’t get freedom. You have to take it,” John Dennison replied. “I wonder if we know how any more.”
That was a better question than Mike wished it were. He was having trouble getting used to what freedom he had. For fifteen years, Jeebies and soldiers of higher rank had told him what to do and when to do it. Figuring out how to use time on his own was harder than he’d expected. For twenty years, Joe Steele had told the whole country what to do and when to do it. Maybe picking up where it had left off wouldn’t be so easy.
When Mike asked to knock off early that afternoon, John let him. He ambled around Casper, listening to what people were saying. Anybody’d figure I was a reporter or something, he thought, laughing at himself.
But he didn’t keep laughing long. Everybody he listened to-in a park and at a gas station, in a general store and at the public library-seemed shocked and saddened that Joe Steele had died. It wasn’t just words. Words were easy to feign. Tears came harder, especially for men. Mike saw more red eyes and tear-streaked cheeks than he ever had before.
The two things he heard most often were He was like a father to all of us and What will we do without him? He wanted to scream at everybody who said either one of those. He wanted to, but he didn’t. Joe Steele might be dead. Flags might fly at half staff. The labor encampments were still very much going concerns. Anybody who’d been through them once never wanted to see them twice.
When he went back to the house he and Midori were renting, he found she’d heard the news on the radio. “This is what Japan felt, first when General Tojo was killed, then when we learned the Emperor was dead,” she said. “We thought the world was coming to an end.”
Mike had never told her he’d been the first American soldier to recognize the dead Hirohito. He didn’t tell her now, either. You tried not to hurt the people you loved. He did say, “General Tojo may not go down in history too well. Neither will Joe Steele.”
“Who is President now? They say Garner, but I do not know anything about Garner,” Midori said.
“We’ll all find out,” Mike answered. “He’s an old man. He’s been Vice President since 1933. He’s from Texas. He used to be in Congress. Now you know as much about him as I do. I don’t even know if he can hold on to the job.”
“Will someone try to take it away from him?” Midori asked. “Can they do that here in America?”
“If you’d asked me before Joe Steele took over, I would’ve laughed myself silly and then told you no,” Mike said. “Now? Now, babe, all I can tell you is, I haven’t got any idea. We’ll all find out.”
* * *
Joe Steele lay in state in the Rotunda of the Capitol. Flower arrangements made a U around the bronze casket. Photographers had snapped pictures of Washington dignitaries-the new President, the California cronies, J. Edgar Hoover, Attorney General Wyszynski, Chief Justice Bush, Secretary of War Marshall, and a few Senators and Congressmen-standing by the coffin. Charlie wasn’t sorry not to be included in those photos. He would have bet all the politicos were suspiciously eyeing the men closest to them. And he would have bet that Joe Steele, dead or not, dominated every picture.
After the dignitaries withdrew, ordinary people started filing through the Rotunda to pay their last respects to the man who’d been President longer than any two of his predecessors. Nobody had to come. Nobody had to wait in the long, long line that stretched out of the great marble building and down the Mall, doubling back on itself several times. The Jeebies wouldn’t haul you away if you stayed home. People came because they wanted to or because they needed to. They came by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands.
That outpouring of respect and grief made Charlie wonder whether Joe Steele would have won all his elections even if he hadn’t left anything to chance. He might well have. But he’d never been one to risk anything he didn’t have to. He’d always assumed the deck would be crooked. If he didn’t stack it, someone else would. He made damn sure nobody else did.
They’d planned to let him lie there one day, till eight p.m. The crowds were so large, they kept the Capitol open all day and all night. . for three days in a row. When they closed it at last, disappointed mourners threw rocks and bottles at the police and Jeebies who tried to clear them away.
Joe Steele went into the ground at Arlington National Cemetery, on the Virginia side of the Potomac. His final resting place wasn’t far from where he’d executed the Supreme Court Four and other adjudged traitors. Charlie wondered how many besides him would think of that. Most of the reporters covering the funeral hadn’t been in the business when Joe Steele started ordering people shot.
John Nance Garner delivered the memorial address. He started by adapting Shakespeare: “I come to praise Joe Steele, not to bury him. For all he did will live on in this country for years to come. He lifted us out of the Depression by our bootstraps. Not everyone now remembers how bad off we were then. He led us through the greatest war in the history of the world. And he made sure the Reds wouldn’t be the only ones with atom bombs. We’re as free as we are on account of him.”