I looked at my daughter, who was in her playpen playing with a string of big plastic beads, and a shudder of premonitory rage passed through me.
Then and there I decided to accept the speech-writing job lately offered to me by Stewart Carl, who was running for Congress on a tough-on-drugs platform.
Hamid died before they could execute him, but he outlived many of his victims.
In the night Owen woke raving. He thrashed about with uncanny energy, flailing at unseen enemies. He called out to them in wordless wheedling tones, as if begging for mercy. His ancient face looked like boiling oatmeal; his eyes were full of hopeless pleading. He didn't seem to see me.
After a while he fell silent and his breathing steadied.
Stewart Carl relied on me to furnish him with words, because he had none of his own.
Stewart Carl is nothing, no matter how high he has risen. He had the right face, the right body language-he looked good on television and that's why he's now acting chief executive of the United States. I suppose he'll hold that office for life. I can't imagine Stewart waking up one morning and deciding that the Emergency is over.
He'll live a long time, I expect. He has no vices.
I remember-with bitter regret-the day the old fisherman tried to kill him.
Stewart was just a junior congressman then, in the middle of his first term. Some months before, he'd managed to coattail himself into minor prominence by being one of six coauthors of the Drug Offenders Financial Deterrent Act, which substantially broadened the federal government's powers of seizure. A report had just appeared from the General Accounting Office, praising the Act's effectiveness in providing much-needed funds for enforcement, in tandem with a DEA report on the Act's effectiveness in flushing out drug criminals who'd attempted to take refuge in legitimate employment.
Stewart and I were celebrating beside my desk. I held a fistful of congratulatory media clippings. There was much praise for the boldness of DOFDA, the timeliness of DOFDA, the obvious necessity of DOFDA. Related stories detailed the obscenely sybaritic lifestyles of various bloated Colombian magnates. The reaction from Stewart's north Florida district was ecstatic: they hailed Stewart as a great statesman, battling the liberal bleederweeps for the hearts and minds of America's straying children.
I didn't yet have a full-time secretary, so the little man opened the door unannounced. He peeped diffidently into the room, saw Stewart raising a tumbler of non-alcoholic champagne.
«Mr. Carl?» he asked-though I'm sure he recognized Stewart.
Stewart frowned, lowered his champagne. «Ah... yes?»
The fisherman was dressed in an old-fashioned black suit, a little shiny at the knees and elbows, a suit he probably wore only to funerals. His face was full of that ruddy decay that comes from a life on the water.
As the old man came through the door, he straightened his arm, gave it a little shake, and a rod with a fat cylinder on one end dropped from his sleeve into his hand. He moved toward Stewart with a sort of glassy determination, obviously bent on murder. His weapon turned out to be a cut-down bangstick, a device used by divers to kill sharks-nothing but wood and high-density plastic, reloaded with ceramic shot, invisible to metal detectors.
Stewart made a bleating sound. As the old man approached, Stewart darted behind me. The fisherman tried to reach past me with the bangstick, but I slapped at it, knocked it away, and it detonated on the corner of my desk. A couple of pellets lodged in my calf; one hit Stewart in the foot. The old man dropped the now-useless stick.
I'll say this for Stewart: once the old man had taken his one shot, Stewart was a lion. He leaped over the desk and pummeled the old man to the floor, and then kicked him several times with his uninjured foot.
At the fisherman's trial, testimony was given that his deckhand had been caught in possession of marijuana. Under the «implied consent» provision of DOFDA, even though the deckhand had never brought drugs aboard his employer's vessel, the court had confiscated the old man's boat, ruling that the old man should have known that his employee was engaged in the sale or consumption of illegal drugs.
«It's not right,» the old man had said. «It's not right to destroy a man for not being smart enough.»
I attended the trial as a witness for the prosecution. It was an unsettling experience. The old man spoke with trembling dignity: Stewart was his congressman. He had not only promoted the law under which the boat had been taken, he had also refused to help when any fool should have been able to see how wrong the law was. What else could he do? Stewart had taken his life; he wanted Stewart's in exchange.
He was sentenced to death, as mandated under the new Violent Drug Offenders Act. When he heard the sentence, he stood silently, head bowed, all the fight in him used up.
Stewart's well-publicized bravery in subduing this assassin took him to the Senate three years later. The timing of the fisherman's execution-an excellent news peg arranged by Stewart's allies in the Federal Reformed Penal Division-helped put Stewart over the top.
Owen woke before dawn, lucid. His stirrings roused me soon after; I no longer sleep soundly. His voice seemed clearer and for a while I thought he might have recovered some strength.
«John,» he said. «I'd appreciate a drink, if you'd be so kind.»
I fetched a cup of rusty water.
He drank carefully, spilling only a little. «That was good, John.»
He settled back against the bundle of rags that served him as a pillow. «Will there be breakfast this morning?» he asked brightly.
I listened to the shriek of the sandstorm. «No, I don't think so.» The guards don't make their rounds when the sand blows; it's hard on their equipment.
«Ah.» He didn't look very disappointed. «Well, too bad. I'll tell you another story, then, to pass the time 'til lunch.»
«You've heard about Woodstock,» he said, smiling toothlessly. «I know you have; all the old guys say they were there, except for me.
«Well, you know they weren't. But they saw the movie, and they think they know enough to pretend they were there, or else they wish they'd been there so much that they believe it now. I wasn't there; I was down in Mexico, pretending to be a smuggler. But that's another story.
«When the movie came out, I was over in Vietnam, loading naplam on airplanes. I went to see it half a dozen times when it was playing at one of the Da Nang base theaters. Awake or asleep, I dreamed about being back in the World and it was worse after I'd seen that movie, all those free happy people. I'd be out on the flightline in that pounding sun, and I'd turn my cap around so the bill hung down my neck. So my shadow would seem like the shadow of a guy who had long hair down past his shoulders. I'd look at that shadow and pretend to be someone else. Somewhere else.
«But this story isn't really about the movie, or about Vietnam, this story. Just a couple of weeks before I finally got on that freedom bird back to the World, Jimi Hendrix died. I overheard a bunch of brothers talking about it; they were standing around smoking Kools laced with heroin and telling each other that it couldn't be true, that Hendrix couldn't be dead. Their voices had that soft poppy comfortableness; listening to them I could almost believe it was just some publicity stunt.
«A month before, some kid I knew vaguely had bought a vial of liquid opium-runny dregs I guess-from one of the ARVN soldiers who hung around the barracks. The kid was showing it around the chowhall that evening, proud as a peacock, and the next morning when his roommate came off-shift, the kid was dead in his bunk. Drowned in vomit, same as Hendrix.»